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Monday, November 10, 2014

Music: Current count 23996 [23966] rated (+30), 531 [540] unrated (-9).

Thought the odds I might cross the 24000 rated level this week were pretty good, but despite a fairly productive week I fell a bit short. Next week for sure. Probably not tonight. Most likely tomorrow. Just a number, and in some ways a rather low one. I recall talking to John Rockwell back in the 1970s when he had twenty-some thousand LPs in his collection. If he only had the pedestrian habit of keeping lists and jotting down grades, he could have well over 100,000 by now. I only started doing this as an aide de memoire in the 1990s, when I had about 3000 LPs and less than a thousand CDs. However, as so often happens when you start to measure something, it takes on a life of its own. I doubt Cap Anson had any clue that he had 3000 hits, nor that Sam Crawford realized he retired just short (2961). Al Kaline was conscious enough of his stats that he hung on to get 3007 hits, but I remember him saying that had he realized that 400 home runs would have put him into one of those exclusive clubs, he would have hit more. (He wound up with 399.)

Didn't get any new records this past week -- the three listed below came today, and two of those have 2015 release dates. I've had to open 2015 files, not that there is anything interesting in them yet. The 2014 metafile is currently up to 2615 records (807 rated or owned). I worked a little on it last week, mostly trying to fill in some missing jazz records -- that led me to Smoke Sessions, a generally good mainstream label (if that's your bag).

The Jinx Lennon records are on Bandcamp. Liam Smith is a fan, and he turned Robert Christgau onto them, resulting in last week's Expert Witness. I (more or less) agree, although I'll add that I didn't find Lennon's outrage either comforting or cathartic. I just find so much of what's happening today to be sad and pathetic -- not least because it wouldn't take much intelligence, sensitivity, and good will to come up with very different outcomes.

I didn't tweet about the Jinx Lennon albums, mostly because my own longer write-ups aren't very coherent. Ideally, I'd take another run at the writing (if not the albums) before Rhapsody Streamnotes posts (probably next week rather than this, although I currently have 56 reviews in the draft file).

New records rated this week:

• Greg Abate Quartet: Motif (2014, Whaling City Sound): alto saxophonist with mainstream quartet leaning bebop, plays fast, brilliant sound, jumps right out [cd]: A-
• Allison Au Quartet: The Sky Was Pale Blue, Then Grey (2012 [2014], self-released): Toronto group, alto sax-piano-bass-drums, moody postbop with spoken word [cd]: B+(**)
• Otis Brown III: The Thought of You (2014, Blue Note): drummer, would like to break out if not cross over, but gets comflicting advice/help [r]: B
• Kevin Conlon/The Groove Rebellion: In Transit (2014, Blujazz): bassist-crooner, the guitar-bass-drums groove more swing than funk, nice sax too [cd]: B+(*)
• Farmers by Nature: Love and Ghosts (2011 [2014], AUM Fidelity, 2CD): piano trio -- Gerald Cleaver, William Parker, Craig Taborn -- my how Taborn has grown! [r]: A-
• Jean Luc Fillon: Oboman Plays Cole Porter: Begin the Night . . . (2013 [2014], Soupir Editions): along with Pianoman and Violaman, a nice little chamber jazz trio, actually too nice [cd]: B
• Brad Goode Quartet: Montezuma (2013 [2014], Origin): trumpet quartet, elegant, spacious with knots of tension, poised for the trumpet to break through [cd]: B+(**)
• Vincent Herring: Uptown Shuffle (2014, Smoke Sessions): alto saxophonist, leading a very mainstream quartet (Chestnut, Farnsworth), runs a little hot [r]: B+(**)
• Eric Hofbauer Quintet: Prehistoric Jazz Volume 1: The Rite of Spring (2014, Creative Nation Music): Stravinsky for jazz quintet, the classical lurch modern and campy, the guitar sweet [cd]: B+(***)
• Eric Hofbauer Quintet: Prehistoric Jazz Volume 2: Quintet for the End of Time (2014, Creative Nation Music): Messiaen for jazz quintet, focus cello but interesting when chaos breaks [cd]: B+(**)
• Will Holshouser/Matt Munister/Marcus Rojas: Introducing Musette Explosion (2014, Aviary): accordion-guitar-tuba for folkish, semipop jazz [cd]: B+(**)
• Javon Jackson: Expression (2014, Smoke Sessions): tenor saxophonist goes back to basics with a straightforward quartet, notably Orrin Evans on piano [r]: B+(*)
• Jonathan Kreisberg: Wave Upon Wave (2014, New for Now Music): guitar jazz that doesn't break out of the Montgomery mode, always a comfort zone [cd]: B+(*)
• Harold Mabern: Right on Time (2014, Smoke Sessions): veteran postbop pianist, never quite lost his Memphis roots, plays a trio with Webber/Farnsworth [r]: B+(*)
• Michael Mantler: The Jazz Composer's Orchestra Update (2013 [2014], ECM): scores from JCOA's 1960s heyday, but outsourced to cost-effective pros [dl]: B
• Delfeayo Marsalis: The Last Southern Gentlemen (2014, Troubadour Jass): trombonist leads piano-bass-drums through genteel, sombre, charming standards [cd]: B+(***)
• Ross Martin/Max Johnson/Jeff Davis: Big Eyed Rabbit (2014, Not Two): guitar-bass-drums, didn't know the guitarist, and still don't [r]: B
• Bette Midler: It's the Girls! (2014, East/West): girl group repertoire, great songs done respectably, but didn't she used to be a bit subversive? [r]: B
• Miho Nobuzane: Simple Words: Jazz Loves Brazil (2014, self-released): Japanese pianist, picks up a Brazilian band in Brooklyn, get the vibe right [cd]: B+(*)
• O'Death: Out of Hands We Go (2014, Northern Spy): Brooklyn alt-rock band with a bit of Irish, mostly filtered through folkies like Dock Boggs [r]: B+(***)
• Clarence Penn & Penn Station: Monk: The Lost Files (2012 [2014], Origin): drummer-led sax quartet, ten Monk tunes, one never tires of hearing them [cd]: B+(*)
• Doug Seegers: Going Down to the River (2014, Rounder): honky tonker, fell through cracks of Nashville, discovered by a Swedish tourist [r]: A-
• The Spin Quartet: In Circles (2013 [2014], Origin): postbop, trumpet-tenor sax-bass-drums, all names you don't know with own albums but stronger together [cd]: B+(**)
• Vince Staples: Hell Can Wait (2014, Def Jam, EP): west coast rapper with some mixtapes, got a label now but only a seven-song, 23:30 EP budget [r]: B+(*)
• Touch and Go Sextet: Live at the Novara Jazz Festival (2012 [2014], Nine Winds): Lisa Mezzacappa (bass) and Vijay Anderson (drums) stir up four horn leads [cd]: B+(***)
• Ernie Watts Quartet: A Simple Truth (2013 [2014], Flying Dolphin): tenor saxophonist, always recognizable, and still able to sprint through "Bebop" [r]: B+(**)

Old records rated this week:

• Jinx Lennon: Live at the Spirit Store (2000, Septic Tiger): [bc]: B+(*)
• Jinx Lennon: 30 Beacons of Light for a Land Full of Spite, Thugs, Drug Slugs and Energy Vampires (2002, Septic Tiger): [bc]: B+(**)
• Jinx Lennon: Know Your Station Gouger Nation!!! (2006, Septic Tiger): [bc]: A-
• Jinx Lennon: Trauma Themes Idiot Times (2009, Septic Tiger): [r]: A-
• Jinx Lennon: National Cancer Strategy (2010, Septic Tiger): [bc]: B+(***)
• Bette Midler: Live at Last (1977, Atlantic): [r]: B+(*)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Ballister: Worse for the Wear (Aerophonic): January 6
• Michel Lambert: Journal des Épisodes II (Jazz From Rant): November 18
• Nate Wooley/Dave Rempis/Pascal Niggenkemper/Chris Corsano: From Wolves to Whales (Aerophonic): January 6

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, November 9, 2014

Thought I'd do a quickie on post-election links but I've been so bummed and lethargic this week it's taken until Sunday anyway. Not just the elections, either, nor the news that the Supreme Court will practice its ideological activism on insurance subsidies for people unfortunate enough to live in states that couldn't (actually, wouldn't) get their act together under the ACA.

The takeaway from the election seems to be that voter suppression and nearly infinite money works for Republicans. The 4% "skew" toward the Democrats that Nate Silver found in the polls seems to be people who intended to vote but at the last minute either didn't or couldn't. That was enough to tilt about 5-6 senate races. But also Democrats didn't do a good job of articulating issues -- it's noteworthy that progressive issues won pretty much across the board when they weren't attached to candidates who could be linked to Obama. To pick on one example: Mark Pryor's campaign consisted of a vacuous slogan ("Put Arkansas First") and ads warning that Tom Cotton wanted to kill off Medicare and Social Security. That's not inaccurate, and would have won if voters really took Cotton to be that much of a threat, but many voters concluded that the risk wasn't that great. On the other hand, Cotton's ads did nothing more than equate Pryor with Obama. I can't tell you why that mattered, or why that worked, but it did.

• Ryan Cooper: What Democrats get wrong about inequality: Lots of things.

  There are various complex models for this, but the general explanation is fairly intuitive: Modern economies are built on a mass market. But if the great majority of people don't have much (or any) disposable income, then there is no mass market, and it's harder to start a business relying on any kind of mass sales. And with weak consumer spending, existing businesses have little reason to invest in growth, and instead disgorge their profits to shareholders, exacerbating the trend. In the end, you get a hollowed-out, bifurcated economy, where low-grade goods are sold to the broke masses on razor-thin margins, while incomprehensible sums slosh around weird luxury markets.

  There's more to it than this. The breakdown of capital controls makes it easy to reinvest profits abroad, where there is more potential for middle-class growth. (I first noticed this in the early 1990s, when Greenspan lowered interest rates to stimulate the economy, and virtually all of that cheap money went abroad -- mostly, it seemed, into currency speculation, resulting in busts in East Asia, Mexico, and elsewhere. Conversely, foreign investors buy up assets in the US -- there was a tremendous boom in this during the 1980s, and while less commented on the trend continues.)

  By the way, I accidentally clicked on a link in Cooper's article and it led to a fascinating article by J.W. Mason, Disgorge the Cash:

  If you read the business press, you're used to these kinds of stories. A company whose mission is making something gets bought out or bullied into becoming a company whose mission is making payments to shareholders. Apple is only an especially dramatic example. But the familiarity of this kind of story is a sign of a different relationship between corporations and the financial system from what prevailed a generation ago.

  Prior to the 1980s, share repurchases were tightly limited by law, and a firm that borrowed in order to pay higher dividends would have been regarded as engaging in a kind of fraud. Shareholders were entitled to their dividends and nothing more -- neither a share in any exceptional profits, nor a say in the management of the firm. In the view of Owen Young, the long-serving chairman of General Electric in the early 20th century, "the stockholders are confined to a maximum return equivalent to a risk premium. The remaining profit stays in the enterprise, is paid out in higher wages, or is passed on to the customer."

  This, of course, has all changed since the 1980s, and it's worth underscoring that changes in law, and therefore political policy, were necessary to enable it. Much more of interest here -- I like the line on the post-WWII corporation: "Whether the managerial firm was the 'soulful corporation' of Galbraith or the soul-crushing monopoly capital of Baran and Sweezy, it was run according to its own growth imperatives, not to maximize returns to shareholders." Then there's this:

  Keynes's call for the "euthanasia of the rentier" toward the end of The General Theory is typically taken as a playful provocation. But as Jim Crotty has argued, this idea was one of Keynes's main preoccupations in his political writings in the 1920s. In his 1926 essay "The End of Laissez Faire," he observed that "one of the most interesting and unnoticed developments of recent decades has been the tendency of big enterprise to socialize itself." As shareholders' role in the enterprise diminishes, "the general stability and reputation of the institution are more considered by the management than the maximum of profit for the shareholders." With enough time, the corporations may evolve into quasi-public institutions like universities, "bodies whose criterion of action within their own field is solely the public good as they understand it." Veblen, observing the same developments but with a less sunny disposition, imagined that the managers of productive enterprises would eventually tire of "sabotage" by the notional owners and organize to overthrow them, seizing control of production as a "Soviet of engineers."

  Of course, that never happened, but maybe it should have -- the "euthanasia of the rentier" if not necessarily the "Soviet of engineers."

• Kathleen Geier: Inequality, the Flavor of the Month: From June, but linked to post-election to remind us how little mileage the Democrats gained from the great issue of our time.

  Truth be told, it was never clear how serious Obama ever was about fighting inequality. Though his big inequality speech marked a step forward, as many of us noted at the time, it also contained serious omissions. The economist Max Sawicky observed that much of that speech didn't actually concern inequality. Rather, it was about social mobility, which is something entirely different.

  Writer Anat Shenker-Osorio pointed out that perhaps the most glaring omission of all in Obama's inequality speech was a simple one: a villain. To hear Obama and the Democrats tell it, inequality is something that just happened. An awful lot of sentences in Obama's speech used passive voice constructions -- phrases like "the deck is stacked," "taxes were slashed," and so on. His speech failed to craft any compelling narrative about exactly who did what to whom. Inequality remained an abstract concept.

  The timidity of Obama's rhetoric -- a faintness of heart that extends to many other Dems -- stands in sharp contrast to the talking points of many Republicans. Right-wing populists consistently point the finger at a rogues' gallery of liberal elitists, government bureaucrats, and the like. In the past, not only did economically progressive presidents vilify the plutocratic enemies of the American people, but they went about it with a certain gusto. Theodore Roosevelt issued thundering denunciations against "malefactors of great wealth." In his "I welcome their hatred" speech, FDR attacked as "tyrants" the "employers and politicians and publishers" who opposed the pro-labor policies of the New Deal.

  But today's Democratic Party is a different animal. By default, Democrats are the party of working Americans, and sometimes they do pass legislation that helps the majority. But they are also deeply corrupted by their own corporate ties. The Democrats' anti-equality agenda is a case in point. The party supports some admirable policies targeted at helping low-income Americans -- like raising the minimum wage, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, and universal pre-K. But party leaders are far more ambivalent about policies that challenge the one percent and the power of capital -- stricter financial regulations, cracking down on CEO pay, a return to confiscatory income tax rates, fair trade, and intellectual property reform. Unless we rein in the wealth and power of the one percent, inequality will continue to spiral out of control.

• Paul Krugman: The Uses of Ridicule: Case example is billionaire hedge fund operator Paul Singer, who has discovered proof that hyperinflation is actually happening:

  Meanwhile, a quick hit. Matt O'Brien has a lot of fun with Paul Singer, a billionaire inflation truther who is sure that the books are cooked because of what he can see with his own eyes:

  . . . check out London, Manhattan, Aspen and East Hampton real estate prices, as well as high-end art prices, to see what the leading edge of hyperinflation could look like

  Hyperinflation in the Hamptons; hard to beat that for comedy, although Matt adds value with the Billionaires Price Index.

  Actually, I noticed this long ago (so long it certainly doesn't suggest Weimar- or Zimbabwe-style hyperinflation). When workers' wages rise, we worry about inflation, assuming those rises will be factored into future prices (because, heaven forbid, they can't possibly come out of profits). On the other hand, when asset prices rise, we assume they're finding their true value, even though the 2008 collapse of the housing bubble shows us that there is no such thing. That all seems awfully convenient for asset holders (and damn unfortunate for wage earners). But doesn't basic economic theory tell us that prices reflect the balance of supply and demand? When demand goes up relative to supply, prices rise -- and how is that different from inflation? We happen to live in a world where the rich is getting so much richer so fast that there simply isn't enough rich-folk-goods (Hamptons real estate, high-end art) to go around, so of course they bid up, and therefore inflate, the prices. That's really all there is to the bubble in Hamptons real estate. And the corrollary to that is that a lot of very rich people currently own assets that aren't really worth anything like they think: there is a substantial real transfer of wealth going on from the 99% to the 1%, but also this asset inflation bubble. If, say, there was a serious effort to rein in the super rich -- increasing income (and capital gains) taxes up toward 70%, regulating hedge funds and other rentiers out of business -- that asset bubble would collapse.

  Krugman makes other good points, but the best come from this golden oldie by Molly Ivins (from 1995, on Rush Limbaugh, but how little has changed?).

  Psychologists often tell us there is a great deal of displaced anger in our emotional lives -- your dad wallops you, but he's too big to hit back, so you go clobber your little brother. Displaced anger is also common in our political life. We see it in this generation of young white men without much education and very little future. This economy no longer has a place for them. The corporations have moved their jobs to Singapore. Unfortunately, it is Limbaugh and the Republicans who are addressing the resentments of these folks, and aiming their anger in the wrong direction.

  In my state, I have not seen so much hatred in politics since the heyday of the John Birch Society in the early 1960s. Used to be you couldn't talk politics with a conservative without his getting all red in the face, arteries standing out in his neck, wattles aquiver with indignation -- just like a pissed-off turkey gobbler. And now we're seeing the same kind of anger again.

• Martin Longman: Waning Power for Blacks and Democrats: No coincidence that 2014 was the first election without the Voting Rights Act to protect black voters in the Old South. The Republicans have put a lot of effort into eradicating white Democratic office holders in the South, no matter how little ideological difference they present. The effect is reduce visible Democratic office holders to the black minority, reinforcing the Republican brand as the White People's Party. Whether they've done this because they are racists or just because it's a winning strategy, the effect is to prolong racism in the South and elsewhere. Assuming Landrieu is toast, the only Democratic senator in the old confederate states are in outliers Virginia and Florida, and neither is easy.

  There's no point in sugar-coating this. In the Deep South, the Democratic Party is now the non-white party, and minority politicians don't have the white partners they need to exercise any but the most local political power. While the problem is less severe in the border states, it has clearly made advances there. You can look at pretty much the whole Scots-Irish migration from the Virginias to Oklahoma and see that the Democrats were trounced last Tuesday. They badly lost Senate elections in West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, and Arkansas, and they actually lost two Senate elections each in South Carolina and Oklahoma. Their seat in Virginia was only (just barely) saved by the DC suburbs in the northeastern part of the state.

  Longman also has a detailed piece on the House elections, The Midterm Results Were Not Completely Preordained, if you're still interested. If not, you might consider this paragraph -- one recipe for an exceptionally low turnout is the media message that these elections didn't matter:

  Regardless, you can say that your models predicted a big night for the Republicans all you want, but I still blame the media. I blame the media for creating the first federal election season in my lifetime in which the elections weren't the top story for the last two months of the campaign. By focusing so heavily on other stories, like ISIS and the Ebola virus, the media smothered the Democratic message.

• Wendy R Weiser: How Much of a Difference Did New Voting Restrictions Make in Yesterday's Close Races?: The 2014 election was the first one run without the protections of the Voting Rights Act. It was also the first midterm election run under a spate of new voter suppression laws ushered in by Republicans after 2010 to keep turnout low. Weiser cites close election cases in North Carolina, Kansas, Virginia, and Florida, with various studies showing 2-3% drops due to new laws. "Under Florida's law, the harshest in the country, one in three African-American men is essentially permanently disenfranchised." Weiser also points out that while the Texas governorship was decided by more than "the 600,000 registered voters in Texas who could not vote this year because they lack IDs the state will accept" those citizens' inability to vote has an effect up and down the ticket, and indeed makes it that much harder for Democrats to run candidates. One thing that's rarely commented upon is that voter restriction laws not only prevent some people from exercising their voting rights, they intimidate many more from even trying.

  For more, see Brad Friedman: The Results Were Skewed Toward Republicans, which cites Wieser but goes much further, as well as casting a jaundiced eye at Nate Silver's conclusion that the polls were skewed.

Also, a few links for further study:

• Q&A: James K Galbraith on the Myth of Petpetual Growth, How Language Shapes Economic Thought, and More: An interview with Galbraith, whose new book, The End of Normal: The Great Crisis and the Future of Growth is next on my reading list. Galbraith seems to doubt Ryan Cooper's argument that we need to counter inequality to increase growth. I've long agreed with Cooper (and Stiglitz, but not Krugman) that inequality is depressing demand at least in the US, but Galbraith seems to be arguing that growth is being hampered by more than just inequality -- e.g., that technology has something to do with it. One thing I'm pretty sure of is that technological advances have done much to blunt the political impact of inequality -- in effect, big TVs and smart cell phones make us less bitter about the rich getting richer. The new book is certain to be interesting. I've said many times that Galbraith's The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too is the best political book of the last decade.

• Mike Konczal/Bryce Covert: The Real Solution to Wealth Equality: "Instead of just giving people more purchasing power, we should be taking basic needs off the market altogether." Social Security does this. So would universal healthcare and free education. Konczal and Covert have expanded this into a regular column in The Nation. All of these are worth reading:

  • The Republican Playbook for Cutting Anti-Poverty Programs [9/22]: "Block grants also mean trusting states to prioritize the needs of low-income people. This sounds like a sick joke, considering the approach of various states to Obama's Medicaid expansion."
  • Why Prisons Thrive Even When Budgets Shrink [10/13]: "The necessary agenda -- from stopping the "war on drugs" to rejecting carceral force as our first response to social problems -- requires not investing more in the existing criminal-justice system, but simply doing less."
  • Does the Minimum Wage Kill Jobs? [10-27]: "Even this year, the thirteen states that raised their minimum wages on January 1 have experienced higher employment growth than those that didn't."
  • The Latest Debate Over Taxing the Rich Misses One Crucial Fact [11/17]: "Progressives have forgotten that taxes do more than just raise money." Bonus quote: "High inheritance taxes don't just prevent plutocracies from forming; they also encourage the rich to donate to civil society, directing private riches toward culture, education and charity."
  • Red States See Massive Public Sector Job Losses: "Twelve red states account for 70 percent of all state and local public sector jobs lost since 2010."
  • How Paul Ryan Would Decimate the New Deal: "Ryan wouldn't just slash Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. He would fundamentally alter how those programs work."

• Peter Van Buren: What Could Possibly Go Right? Iraq War 3.0, he calls it. Ignoring 1.0, I'm reminded more of Marx's quip about the Bonapartes: history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce -- although for all concerned it'll look more like tragedy all over again: it's only from an insensitive distance that one can sit back and revel in how ridiculous everyone involved is.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Got up this morning. The sky was clear, the air crisp, a really lovely day. People went to work. Some drove by. Others walked their dogs. The mail came. It all seems like a normal day. The ramifications of yesterday's elections will take some time to manifest themselves. It occurs to me that maybe I shouldn't fret so much. I'm 64. By the time the Republicans destroy Obamacare I'll be 65 and eligible for Medicare. By the time they kill off Medicare, I'll be dead. And otherwise I'm relatively immune to the scourges of Republican rule: I don't need decent or affordable schools, I'm unlikely to be harrassed by police or criminals (and the odds of a self-righteous gun nut striking me aren't much higher than the odds of being struck by lightning or mowed down by a tornado). I'm out of the job market, but (for now at least) don't need welfare either. And I don't have children, so while I wish good things for generations to come I don't have much skin in that game. If other Americans don't care what happens to them, why should I?

What happened? Nate Silver's postmortem claims The Polls Were Skewed Toward Democrats. I wish he had phrased this differently: the takeaway is likely to be that the pollsters were biased, something Republicans are always whining about (although Democrats usually suspect the opposite). Other reasons are possible: late shifts, volatile voter turnout levels. Pollsters try to limit their samples to "likely voters" but that can be hard to guess ahead of the fact. I don't have much data on turnout so far, but accepting the premise that people who don't vote are generally more liberal than people who do -- there's quite a bit of evidence for that -- a Democratic vote shortfall suggests a lower-than-expected turnout.[1] One turnout figure I have is Sedgwick County in KS (Wichita), where turnout was 51.5% -- actually a bit less than in 2010, despite much more competitive races this year. I suspect a variation on the so-called Bradley Effect (where people tell pollsters something that sounds better than the truth): I suspect more people told pollsters they would vote than actually did.

Silver's data shows that Republican Senate candidates did better than their weighted poll averages in 26 (of 34) races (he leaves KS off the list; Orman ran as an independent, but everyone treated him as a Democrat, especially since the Democratic nominee dropped out and wasn't on the ballot); Republican Gubernatorial candidates did better in 28 (of 35) races. Had the polls been right, the Democrats would have won two Senate seats (North Carolina, Alaska) and four governorships (Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland) they lost, but they would have lost Connecticut. Had the Democrats run two points better than their polls, they would have saved or picked up three Senate seats (Colorado, Georgia, Iowa) and three governships (Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin). That would have turned into a decent night.

Still, polling wasn't the reason Republicans won. I hadn't taken it that seriously, but the main reason's been staring me in the face every time I visited Talking Points Memo: in their "PollTracker" Obama has had a steady job approval rating of 42.9%, ten points below is 52.9% disapproval. That number hasn't budged in months, and it's hard to imagine what Obama could do to move it. He can't legislate anything without help from Congress, and that's something the Republicans won't permit. He could, like Harry Truman when faced a Republian-controlled Congress in 1948, go out on the campaign trail and attack his "do-nothing Congress," but that's not his style (and anyway, he's not up for election). Nor does he really have much to talk about: the economy is recovering but it's not doing most people much good (nor did he do it much good); he has positive stories on issues ranging from domestic oil surpluses to reducing the national debt, but who cares?; he's managed to get back into Iraq and involved in Syria without having a clue where that's going; then there's the panic on Ebola, where the message is a boring we're doing what needs to be done. The quiet competency and subtle nudges he's always aimed for don't move anyone.

The rest of TPM's widget doesn't look so bad for Democrats: their unfavorable rating is 8 point higher than their favorable (46-38), but the Republicans are 20 points unfavorable (50-30). One troubling point is that even though Republicans are less liked and more loathed voters still give them a +2.4% (45.7% to 43.3%) edge in the generic congressional ballot (plus, in the House, they have more incumbents due mostly to gerrymandering). One reason I dismissed the top line is that some people, like me, disapprove of Obama but wouldn't think of defecting to the Republicans over it. (My main gripe is Obama's handling of what I call the Four Wars of 2014 -- Syria, Iraq, Gaza, and Ukraine.) But evidently there aren't many of us. On the other hand, in race after race Republicans figure all they have to do is to identify the Democrat (or in Kansas, independent Greg Orman) with Obama and voters will snap. I expected most people to see through something that transparent, but for various reasons (including but not limited to racism) lots of people are ready to blame Obama for whatever bugs them, no matter what. And a big chunk of the $3.6 billion spent on the campaign went into driving that one point home.

Matt Yglesias explained what's been happening in a post on Mitch McConnell's reëlection:

In the winter of 2008-2009, the leaders of the Obama transition effort had a theory as to how things would go and mainstream Washington agreed with them.

The theory went like this. With large majorities in the House and Senate, it was obvious that lots of Democratic bills would pass. But the White House would be generous and make concessions to Republicans who were willing to leap on the bandwagon. Consequently, incumbent Republicans from states Obama won (Maine, New Hampshire, Ohio, North Carolina, Indiana, Nevada) would be eager to cut deals in which they backed Obama bills in exchange for key concessions. With that process under way, many Republicans who weren't even that vulnerable would be eager to cut deals as well, in search of a piece of the action. As a result, bills would pass the Senate with large 70- to 75-vote majorities, and Obama would be seen as the game-changing president who healed American politics and got things done.

McConnell's counter plan was to prevent those deals. As McConnell told Josh Green, the key to eroding Obama's popularity was denying him the sheen of bipartisanship, and that meant keep Republicans united in opposition:

"Reporters underestimate how powerful the calendar is," says Jim Manley, the former communications director for Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate leader. "Say you want to break a filibuster. On Monday, you file cloture on a motion to proceed for a vote on Wednesday. Assuming you get it, your opponents are allowed 30 hours of debate post-cloture on the motion to proceed. That takes you to Friday, and doesn't cover amendments. The following Monday you file cloture on the bill itself, vote Wednesday, then 30 more hours of debate, and suddenly two weeks have gone by, for something that's not even controversial." All of this has slowed Senate business to a crawl.

"We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals," McConnell says. "Because we thought -- correctly, I think -- that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. When you hang the 'bipartisan' tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there's a broad agreement that that's the way forward."

To prevent Obama from becoming the hero who fixed Washington, McConnell decided to break it. And it worked. Six years into the affair, we now take it for granted that nothing will pass on a bipartisan basis, no appointment will go through smoothly, and everything the administration tries to get done will take the form of a controversial use of executive power.

It's been ugly. But in most voters' mind, the ugliness has attached to Obama and, by extension, Democrats.

Anyone who's paid much attention is aware of Republican obstruction and hostage taking -- some approving and some aghast -- but many don't notice until it's too late, and it's easy for them to blame Obama, especially with the right-wing media attacking Obama for pretty much everything they can imagine. The one exception that reflects back on Republicans seems to be shutting down the government, but folks rarely notice when the safety net is shredded until they fall through and go splat. Similarly, who notices when jobs (e.g., judges and ambassadors) go unfilled as long as they don't affect you personally. But the idea isn't just to obstruct Obama, it's to make life so difficult that the Democrats don't even try to do new things -- and that has the effect of making Obama and the Democrats look ineffective, like they aren't even trying.

What McConnell and the Republicans have done isn't unprecedented -- indeed they did much the same thing to Clinton -- except in frequency and persistence: there's never been anything quite like that before. The Senate, in particular, has many arcane rules ripe for abuse, and only limited by conscience -- something rarely seen among a group who increasingly favor incompetent and unrepresentative government. Like most schemes, the only way around it is to cut through it, exposing the ill intent and holding all sides to a higher standard of public interest. One might expect the mainstream media to do just that, but their sense of even-handedness blinds them to asymmetric behavior. Nor does it help that the media are held by large corporations, not the public trust (an idea increasingly regarded as quaint).

I'm not interested in speculating on what Obama can or cannot, should or should not do during the last two years of his term. I will say that the Democratic Party needs a spokesman independent of the White House, and that they need to rebuild the party from the roots up, much like the Republicans did in the early 1990s. Obama blew his opportunity to get much done when he lost Congress in 2010, much as Clinton did in 1994. That plus eight much-worse-than-wasted years with GW Bush has left us with an increasing roll of problems, little wherewithal to solve them, and it seems even less imagination. Until the latter opens up, we're stuck in this hopeless game, where nothing is possible because nothing viable can be imagined. In this, I'd say the Democrats are as blind as the Republicans, albeit somewhat less cynical.

It's worth noting that nearly all of the actual issues on the various ballots were won by progressives, including a higher minimum wage in Arkansas, more thorough gun control checks in Washington, guaranteed sick leave in several states, and decriminalization of marijuana. (A medical marijuana initiative in Florida lost when it fell just short of a 60% supermajority requirement, after Sheldon Adelson spent millions against it.) Perhaps more Democrats should have run on issues, instead of shying away from them. It's been observed that the election results will most likely end medicare expansion in Arkansas, Kentucky, and West Virginia, but that's due to Republican gains, not to referenda on the issue. Indeed, it's doubtful most voters in those states realize what they've done. All they think they've done is to have thwarted Obama and his nefarious plots.

[1] Indeed, the first turnout numbers show Preliminary Turnout Numbers Are Way Down From 2010 and 2012, the overall percentage voting dropping from 40.9% in 2010 to 36.6% in 2014. (The presidential elections Obama won in 2008 and 2012 drew 56.8% and 53.6% respectively.) Turnout varied from 59.3% in Maine to 28.5% in Texas; Kansas was 42.8%. Although the bottom of the barrel was solid red (Texas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Oklahoma), some Democratic-leaning states had low turnouts (New York: 30.2%; California: 34.8%). I think there are at least two factors here: there is an underlying variation by state (e.g., Minnesota, which ranked 5th this year, is usually near the top, while Texas is almost always at the bottom), which are then tweaked somewhat by having competitive races.

There is also a map which compares 2014 to 2010. States with higher turnout in 2014 are: Nebraska (+7.6), Louisiana, Wisconsin, Maine, Arkansas, Alaska, New Hampshire (+3.1). Kansas was +1.1, a pretty small gain compared to campaign spending (through the roof). Colorado was +1.8, Kentucky +1.8, North Carolina +1.5, Florida +1.4.

Also, Ed Kilgore reports (What the Hell Happened to the Democratic Vote):

Comparing yesterday's exit polls to those of 2012, the first thing that jumps out at you is a big shift in age demographics: under-30 voters dropped from 19 percent of the electorate in 2012 to 13 percent in 2014, while over-65 voters climbed from 16 percent in 2012 to 22 percent in 2014. That's quite close to the age demographics of 2010.

[2] By the way, here's a report on Kansas: How the Kansas Democratic Party Drove Itself to Near Extinction (Pt 1): I can't really vouch for this -- I know some people who are active in the party, but I'm not one of them -- but certainly the lack of organization, offices, and candidate support is a big problem here. The Democrat who ran for an empty Senate seat against Jerry Moran did so with a total budget of about $23,000 (vs. about $5 million, if memory serves). This makes me wonder whether the Democratic gubernatorial ticket this year would have been stronger with Jill Docking on top and Davis slotted for Lieutenant Governor. For one thing, Docking wouldn't have been characterized as a "Lawrence liberal" (she's from Wichita), nor would she have been subject to those lurid "strip club" ads. Women have a good track record in KS politics: the last two Democratic governors were women, and before that two previous Democratic governors were named Docking (Jill married into a rather famous family, as by the way did Kathleen Sebelius). Also see Pt. 2.

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Monday, November 3, 2014

Music: Current count 23966 [23933] rated (+33), 540 [543] unrated (-3).

Week didn't start until Wednesday, when I posted last Music Week, so the rate count rate was exceptionally high -- 30 is a very solid 7-day week, ridiculous for a 5-day week. Played a lot of new stuff on Rhapsody, including a couple records I had acquainted myself with on the road. While the top-rated records all got multiple spins, I didn't dawdle on the clear misses (other than Dan Weiss favorite Ex Hex).

I've especially been missing the recommendations of Jason Gubbels, so was glad to see his Third Quarter 2014 Wrap-Up -- really just a cribsheet. He tabs five records as "pretty great": Run the Jewels, Angaleena Presley, Leonard Cohen, Spider Bags, and Aphex Twin. I had three of those, but "ran the jewels" way too fast a week back to get any real feel for the record, not that I didn't like what I heard [**]. I gave Spider Bags another play: I probably have it too low [*], but not so much so that I felt compelled to regrade it. I only know about half of the "pretty goods" (including Elio Villafranca and Changari below), but only have Orlando Julius' Jaiyede Afro at A-. No major disagreements below that, although the "pretty meh" Bill Frisell was well received by my friends on the Cape (I wound up at [***]), and I dislike Jason Moran's All Rise more than my grade [*] suggests.

Thought I noticed a blip in B+(**) grades this week, so I went to the year-in-progress file to check. I assumed B+ grades would be evenly distributed, but there is a small bell curve in the middle: 168-185-162. Actually, that bump was much more pronounced last year: 222-318-262. And now that I think about it last year's distribution makes more sense: there should be fewer higher-rated records than lower, but my actual lower-rated counts are progressively attenuated as we get ever deeper into records I don't consider prospects. Consider this sequence, comparing this year's count-per-grade to last year's: [A-] 68.7%, [***] 75.6%, [**] 58.1%, [*] 61.8%, [B] 52.9%, [B-] 76.9%. The way I read this, I'm listening to less crap this year -- probably because I don't have the metacritic file to make me conscious of lousy records other people like.

By the way, adding up all these numbers shows I only have 64.2% as many records in the 2014 (738) file as in 2013 (1149 and still growing until I freeze it end of December). It seems unlikely I'll ever make that deficit up (although 1000 is probably a 50-50 proposition).

Get out and vote tomorrow. It's the only day of the year when you get to act like you live in a democracy, even though your choices aren't likely to amount to much and the powers-that-be have done all they could to rig the results. Also the day you can blame your fellow citizens for their foolish choices, as opposed to every other day when the problem is more likely to be the corruption of the system.

New records rated this week:

• Allo Darlin': We Came From the Same Place (2014, Slumberland): I don't follow lyrics well enough to be sure these are as deep as they might be [r]: A-
• Tony Bennett & Lady Gaga: Cheek to Cheek (2014, Interscope): Italian-Americans bonding over their roots: great songs with shlocky arrangements [r]: B+(*)
• Maggie Björklund: Shaken (2014, Bloodshot): singer-songwriter from Denmark to LA, given to open spaces and melancholy with steel guitar shimmer [r]: B
• Chingari [Ranjit Barot/U Shrinivas/Etienne Mbappé]: Bombay Makossa (2014, Abstract Logix): two Indians (mandolin, drums) and a bassist from Cameroon fusion with fusion jazz then sing about it [r]: B+(*)
• Gary Clark, Jr.: Live (2014, Warner Brothers, 2CD): major Texas blues hopeful returns to his strong suit after that awful debut LP, then stretches too long [r]: B+(*)
• Chris Dundas: Oslo Odyssey (2014, BLM, 2CD): LA pianist goes to Norway, picks up a band with a saxophonist suited to his pace, a bass great too [cd]: B+(***)
• Brian Eno/Karl Hyde: High Life (2014, Warp): rough-edged guitar replaces synth for the riffwork, like Fripp minus the Frippertronics [r]: A-
• Ex Hex: Rips (2014, Merge): Mary Timony leads a tight pop-punk trio, no vocal presence, second hand riffs, but they're close to irresistible [r]: B+(***)
• Flying Lotus: You're Dead (2014, Warp): and you've gone to hell with a soundtrack that taunts you with talent then slams the door, repeatedly [r]: B+(**)
• Fumaça Preta: Fumaça Preta (2014, Soundway): Dutch band led by Portuguese-Venezuelan drummer is rooted in garage rock but sports exotic psychedelia and more [r]: A-
• Benjamin Herman: Trouble (2013 [2014], Dox): polishing up standards, stretched and strained by Daniel von Piekartz's sentimental piano and vocals [r]: B+(*)
• EG Kight: A New Day (2014, Blue South): blueswoman from Georgia via Chicago stays close to classic form, which keeps her consistent [r]: B+(**)
• Jerry Lee Lewis: Rock & Roll Time (2014, Vanguard): at 79 has turned full circle back to Memphis; appreciates the guest help but doesn't need it [r]: B+(**)
• Logic: Under Pressure (2014, Def Jam): young rapper makes debut after four mixtapes, avoids guests, does a fair job justifying his name [r]: B+(**)
• Jemeel Moondoc/Connie Crothers: Two (2012, Relative Pitch): alto sax-piano duets, free but far from rough partly because they don't aim for speed [r]: B+(*)
• The New Pornographers: Brill Bruisers (2014, Matador): much viable talent, many pop hooks, often a bit bruised which isn't the problem; caring is [r]: B+(*)
• Karen O: Crush Songs (2006-10 [2014], Cult, EP): Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer goes lo-fi (more like demo quality and EP-length), crude but not without interest [r]: B+(*)
• Tineke Postma/Greg Osby: Sonic Halo (2013 [2014], Challenge): two alto saxes play like one (only better), spur Matt Mitchell to try to steal the show [r]: B+(***)
• Bobby Previte: Terminals (2014, Cantaloupe): five pieces match SO Percussion with a guest; Greg Osby brings jazz, Nels Cline something beyond [r]: B+(*)
• Sylvain Rifflet & Jon Irabagon: Perpetual Motion: A Celebration of Moondog (2013 [2014], Jazz Village): saxophonists toast Moondog, but they also drag a choir in, so texts matter? [r]: B+(*)
• Pat Senatore Trio: Ascensione (2008-12 [2014], Fresh Sound): Josh Nelson plays piano in bassist-led trio, loves the lush harmonies until they're squishy [cd]: B+(**)
• Elio Villafranca and His Jazz Syncopators: Caribbean Tinge: Live From Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola (2011-12 [2014], Motéme): Cuban pianist does two shows uptown, toning down that tinge [r]: B+(*)
• Ezra Weiss Sextet: Before You Know It: Live in Portland (2013 [2014], Roark): live in home town Portland, the gritty horns warm up the joint, a gorgeous ballad closes [cd]: A-
• Luke Winslow-King: Everlasting Arms (2014, Bloodshot): overeducated eclectic singer-songwriter can't quite figure out what to do in New Orleans [r]: B
• Yelle: Complètement Fou (2014, Kemosabe): French electronica leaning toward dance-pop, not crazy at all let alone crazy enough [r]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:

• Jerry Lee Lewis: The Knox Phillips Sessions: The Unreleased Recordings (1970s [2014], Time-Life): at 44(?) he drowns his mid-life crisis, threatening to kick your ass but doesn't [r]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Paul Dietrich Quintet: We Always Get There (Blujazz)
• Aaron Goldberg: The Now (Sunnyside)
• Tony Monaco: Furry Slippers (Summit)

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Sunday, November 2, 2014

Weekend Roundup

Tuesday is election day. Six years ago Barack Obama was elected president with 69 million votes -- 52.9% of the 132 million voters (56.8 of the voting-age population, the highest share since 1968) -- and the Democrats swept both houses of Congress, even achieving what was widely touted as a "fillibuster-proof Senate" (not that I can recall them breaking any fillibusters with narrow partisan votes, aside from the ACA health care reform). Almost immediately, right wing talk radio exploded with hatred for Obama and the Democrats, and the Republican members of Congress turned into intransigent and remarkably effective obstructionists.

Meanwhile, Obama quickly pivoted from promising to change Washington to doing whatever he could to salvage the status quo, starting with the banks that had crashed the economy and Bush's military misadventures in the Middle East. Instead of using his congressional majorities, he plead for bipartisan support, often compromising before he even introduced a plan -- as when he sandbagged his own stimulus program by saddling it with ineffective tax cuts, or introduced health care reform and global warming proposals that were originally hatched in right-wing think tanks. He gave the incumbent Republican Federal Reserve chair an extra term, and he kept on the incumbent Republican Secretary of Defense -- and both screwed him in short form. Moreover, like Bill Clinton when he won in 1992, Obama dismantled a successful national Democratic Party leadership and replaced them with cronies who promptly threw the 2010 congressional election.

The 2010 elections rival 1946 as one of the dumbest things the American people ever did. The Republicans took over the House, not only ending any prospect of progressive legislation but constantly threatening to shut down the federal government. Republicans also took over many governorships and state houses, and used those power bases to consolidate their power: by gerrymandering districts, and by passing laws to make it harder to vote. It turns out that the difference between 2008 and 2010 was not just a matter of Republican enthusiasm and Democratic lethargy: it registered as a massive drop in the number of voters, from 132 million to 90 million, from 56.8% of voting-age population to 37.8% (link; note also that the 2006 turnout was only 37.1% and that produced a Democratic landslide, so it's somewhat variable who stays home).

In 2012, when Obama finally took a personal interest in an election, he was again able to get out the vote (albeit still a bit off from 2008 with 130 million, 53.6%). Obama won again, the Democrats increased their share of the Senate, and won a majority of the vote for the House (but not a majority of seats, thanks to all that gerrymandering, so the last two years have seen the same level of obstruction as the previous two). If those trends hold, turnout will be down again this year, and that will give the elite-favoring Republicans an edge: at this point, nobody expects them to lose the House, and most "experts" expect the Republicans to gain control of the Senate. That would be a horrific outcome, which makes you wonder why the Democrats don't seem to be taking it seriously, and more generally why the press doesn't talk about it as anything but a horserace. That trope suggests a race between two more-or-less equals, horses, whereas the actual race is between predator and prey: if the Democrat is a horse, the Republican is more like a lion, or a pack of wolves (or an army of flesh-eating ants). The Republicans don't back off when a Democrat wins a race. They don't socialize, and don't compromise. They keep attacking, figuring that no matter how much damage they do, the public will blame the incumbent.

An old, but not outdated, Crowson cartoon

It's a long story how the Republicans have gotten to be the menace they currently are -- one I can't go into with any hope of posting today. Suffice it to say they've managed to combine three threads:

• An anti-democratic campaign ethic ranging from Nixon's "dirty tricks" to voter suppression to flooding the airwaves with bile, baldfaced lies, and carefully vetted pet phrases -- anything to seize power.
• Their single substantial political position is to help the rich grow richer, a position that has hardened even as business has become more predatory -- indeed, their individualist, "greed is good" ideology has hardened into self-destructive dogma.
• Since anti-populism is an inherently losing strategy in a democracy, they've built a diverse base by cultivating "single issue voters" -- especially ones who can be focused to hate proxy groups (including those so-called "cultural elites," but mostly the non-white, the poor, single women, deviants, peaceniks, policy wonks, anyone who doesn't like guns).

I know that this sounds like a recipe for disaster, and indeed every time the Republicans have tried to put their ideas into practice they have backfired. (Reagan got away relatively free although his S&L deregulation disaster was a harbinger of things to come, and his arming of the mujahideen in Afghanistan still haunts us. But the Bushes plunged us into endless, bankrupting war, and the latter's laissez-faire bank policy wrecked the economy, while Katrina exposed the moral rot caused by Bush's privatization of government services. And right now Kansas is reeling from Gov. Brownback's "experiments" -- they say that "absolute power corrupts absolutely," and the total hammerlock of the RINO-purged ultra-right party in the Sunflower State offers further proof.) Yet much of the country, led by the fawning mainstream media, continues to accord Republicans a measure of respect they've done nothing to earn. For while the Republicans could care less about destroying the social fabric of the nation, they are always careful to honor the rich, their businesses, the military, the nation's self-important legacy, and, of course, almighty God -- their idea of the natural order of things, one no Democrat politician dare challenge. (Indeed, the Democrats' cheerleader-in-chief for those verities has been Barrack Obama -- the very man most Republicans insist is the root of all evil.)

When the dust settles the amount of money spent on this election will be staggering, not that many people will move on to the next obvious question: since businessmen always seek profits, what sort of return do the rich expect from their largesse? Thanks to modern technology -- caller ID to screen calls and a DVR to skip through commercials -- we've managed to avoid most of the deluge, but I've managed to catch enough to get a sense of how bad unlimited campaign spending has become. Kansas and Arkansas both have competitive races for Governor and Senator, and in both cases the Republicans, with their sense of entitlement, have pulled out all the stops. However, their commercials are one-note attacks on Obama, as if that's the magic word that boils voters' blood.

That acrimony is hard to fathom: a combination of prejudice and ignorance and, well, gullibility if not downright stupidity. For anyone who's paid the least bit of attention over the last six years, Obama is a very cautious, inherently conservative politician -- one who goes out of his way not to ruffle feathers, least of all of the rich and powerful. Indeed, that makes perfect sense: all his life he's strove to conform to the powers that exist, and he's been so adept at it that he's been richly rewarded for his service. The idea that he's surrepititiously out to destroy the country that so flattered him by making him president is beyond ridiculous, yet judging from their cynical ads, Republicans don't just believe this -- they take it as something so obvious they need merely to repeat it. And that's just one of many cases where the Republicans think they can simply talk their way out of reality.

Some scattered links this week:

• Dean Baker: Economists Who Saw the Housing Bubble Were Not Worried About a Depression: The article doesn't really explain the title, but the main point is worth repeating:

  It is quite fashionable among Washington elite types to insist that we would have had another depression if we didn't save the Wall Street banks, but do any of them have any idea what they mean by this?

  The first Great Depression was the result of not having enough demand in the economy. We got out of it finally in 1941 by spending lots of money. The motivation for spending lots of money was fighting World War II, but the key point was spending the money. It might have been difficult politically to justify the spending necessary to restore the economy to full employment without the war, but that is a political problem not an economic problem. We do know how to spend money.

  In effect, the pundits who say that we would have had a depression if we did not bail out the banks are saying that our economic policy is so dominated by flat-earth types that we would have to endure a decade or more of double-digit unemployment, with the incredible amount of suffering it would cause, because the flat-earthers would not allow the spending necessary to restore full employment.

  That characterization of our political process could be accurate, but it is important to be clear what is being said. The claim is not that anything about the financial crisis itself would have caused a depression. The claim is rather that Washington economic policy is totally controlled by people without a clue about economics.

  In fact, let's repeat it again. One of the most basic things we know from macroeconomics is that government can restore a depressed economy to full employment by sufficiently increasing spending, and that if the depression is caused by insufficient demand, government spending is the only way that works. We know that this depression is due to insufficient demand because businesses are sitting on cash instead of investing in more capacity, and giving them more money doesn't change a thing. So the only way to bring employment is for government to spend more, and there are several obvious benefits to that. For one thing, investments in infrastructure pay dividends well into the future, and they are never cheaper than during a depression. That's also true of investments in "human capital" -- education, science, engineering, the arts. But even plain transfers are a plus, as they move money from people who have more than they spend to people who need to spend more. One obvious thing to do when the housing bubble burst was to make it possible to refinance mortgages -- it would have helped banks clean up their balance sheets and it would have help people hang onto their homes -- but it wasn't done, for purely political reasons.

  In fact, virtually none of this was done, again for political reasons -- and that mostly means because of Republican obstruction (although in states with Republicans in power, like Kansas, they did considerably worse). Of course, the Democrats weren't too sharp here either. Obama's belief in "the confidence fairy" was so strong that he spent his first two years insisting that the economy was in better shape than it was, foolishly believing that business would believe him (and not their own accountants) and stop deleveraging. By the time he realized that wasn't working: he had missed the opportunity to blame the whole mess on Bush, he had settled for a stimulus bill way too small, he missed the opportunity to unwind the Bush tax cuts for the rich (and therefore found himself in a gaping deficit hole), and then he stupidly bought into the argument that deficit reduction was more important than cutting unemployment. It's easy enough to see why the Republicans didn't mind sandbagging the economy: it weakened labor markets, scarcely touched monopoly profits, reduced government (and the possibility that government might do something for the people), and in the end people would blame Obama anyway. It's harder to understand why Obama inflicted all this misery on himself, his party, and his voters.

  Forty years ago all this was common sense -- so much so that Richard Nixon proclaimed, "We are all Keynesians now." But the US was more of a democracy then, and the economic effects of government were more clearly seen for what they were. Nixon was a Keynesian because he wanted to get reëlected, and that was what worked. With Obama, you have to wonder.

• Henry Farrell: Big Brother's Liberal Friends: "Sean Wilentz, George Packer and Michael Kinsley are a dismal advertisement for the current state of mainstream liberal thought in America. They have systematically misrepresented and misunderstood Edward Snowden and the NSA." Intellectuals like those three, who spend [at least] as much time trying to separate themselves from the left as they invest in their proclaimed liberalism, are why I felt such contempt for liberals during the Vietnam War (and its broader Cold War context).

  Why do national-security liberals have such a hard time thinking straight about Greenwald, Snowden and the politics of leaks? One reason is sheer laziness. National-security liberals have always defined themselves against their antagonists, and especially their left-wing antagonists. They have seen themselves as the decent Left, willing to deploy American power to make the world a happier place, and fighting the good fight against the knee-jerk anti-Americans.

  This creates a nearly irresistible temptation: to see Greenwald, Snowden and the problems they raise as antique bugbears in modern dress. Wilentz intimates that Greenwald is plotting to create a United Front of anti-imperialist left-wingers, libertarians and isolationist paleoconservatives. Packer depicts Greenwald and Snowden as stalwarts of the old Thoreauvian tradition of sanctimonious absolutism and moral idiocy. Kinsley paints Snowden as a conspiracy-minded dupe and Greenwald as a frustrated Jacobin.

  Yet laziness is only half the problem. A fundamental inability to comprehend Greenwald and Snowden's case, let alone to argue against it, is the other half. National-security liberals have enormous intellectual difficulties understanding the new politics of surveillance, because these politics are undermining the foundations of their worldview.

  I suspect that part of that worldview is a desire to see themselves as part of the security state, something they project as having their own morality, even though there is no evidence of such. This makes them defensive when confronted with an outsider like Greenwald or a turncoat like Snowden. It also makes them gullible to campaigns like the Bush snow job on invading Iraq: their sense of belonging with the state isolates them from adverse consequences to others, even while they justify their acts by pointing to supposed benefits to others (whom I doubt they are actually capable of relating to).

  Another quote:

  Snowden and Greenwald suggest that this project is not only doomed but also corrupt. The burgeoning of the surveillance state in the United States and its allies is leading not to the international spread of liberalism, but rather to its hollowing out in the core Western democracies. Accountability is escaping into a realm of secret decisions and shadowy forms of cross-national cooperation and connivance. As Princeton constitutional scholar Kim Lane Scheppele argues, international law no longer supports national constitutional rights so much as it undermines them. U.S. efforts to promote surveillance are hurting civil liberties at home as well as abroad, as practices more commonly associated with international espionage are redeployed domestically, and as security agencies (pursuing what they perceive as legitimate goals) arbitrage the commingling of domestic and international data to gather information that they should not be entitled to.

• Thomas Frank: Righteous rage, impotent fury: the last days of Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts: I'm still skeptical that Brownback and Roberts will fall on Tuesday, but he's right that it's close, and that it's notable in a year when so much of the conventional wisdom expects Republican gains. It's worth noting that Brownback and Roberts got to this point by two very different routes, but they're likely to fall for the same reasons. Six years ago Roberts was cruising to an easy third term, and Brownback was up in Iowa campaigning for president. Brownback fizzled embarrassingly, losing the caucuses not just to Mike Huckabee -- his rival for the pious church crowd -- but to everyone else as well. He then decided to burnish his credentials with some executive experience, so he gave up his own safe senate seat in 2010 to run for governor. He won easily, then set out to establish his presidential bona fides by overhauling everything in state government to meet state-of-the-art Republican standards. He was, after all, convinced that his ideology worked, and meant to run not just on theory but on proven success. For starters, he had Kansas hire the memorably named Arthur Laffer to come up with a tax proposal: one that eliminated all state income taxes for "small business" owners, which in Kansas includes billionaires like Charles Koch. Laffer assured us that the taxes would be a "shot of adrenaline" straight into the Kansas economy. The only effect they had was to blow a monster hole in the state budget, which led to cutbacks all across the state, which . . . stalled the economy. With Republicans controlling both houses of the state legislature, Brownback had no trouble getting his "experiments" approved, but in 2012 he didn't like the occasional no vote from the few remaining moderate Republicans, so he arranged a purge of the so-called RINOs -- pushing the legislature even more to the right. Resistance against Brownback has been growing almost since the day he took office. The taxes are just one of dozens of issues Brownback has been offensive on, ranging from fanciful new restrictions against abortion providers to a campaign to exterminate the lesser prairie chicken (before the federal government can declare it an "endangered species" -- some kind of inconvenience to ranchers).

  Roberts, on the other hand, had nothing to fear but fear itself, but being the very definition of chickenshit, when the tea partyfolk started questioning his fanaticism he lurched suddenly to the right, even going so far as to vote against the Agriculture bill most Kansas farming corporations depend on. He barely escaped a primary where he was tagged as "liberal in Washington, rarely in Kansas" (indeed, he had to fire a campaign manager who told the press that Roberts had "gone home to Virginia"). And then when he assumed that he'd have no trouble with whoever the Democrats nominated, he wound up facing a well-to-do independent, Greg Orman, with the Democrat bowing out. Since then, his campaign commercials have never risen above the level of trying to equate Orman with Obama and Harry Reid. Orman's ads also identify Obama and Reid as problems in Washington, but add Mitch McConnell and Pat Roberts to the list. Where Brownback is some sort of true believer in things that clearly don't work, Roberts is a mere poster boy for the usual run of Washington corruption. Neither approach is very popular anywhere, but Kansas offers exceptionally vivid choices.

  What Frank doesn't do is take credit for causing this debacle. His book, What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (2004) made a big point about how Republicans took advantage of rank-and-file cultural conservatives, catering to them with election rhetoric then only implementing business favors once elected. Since Frank's book came out, the rank-and-file revolted, and they've pushed their crazy agenda through the legislature -- that's why, for instance, Kansas passed a law to nullify federal gun laws, and another to allow conceal/carry into all government office buildings. Under the old pre-Frank scheme, electing far-right nuts helped the rich get richer but didn't impact many others. Now, everyone's affected, which is one reason for the backlash. Another is the purge, which has rallied hundreds of prominent RINOs to campaign against Brownback.

• Stephen M Walt: Netanyahu's Not Chickenshit, the White House Is: Israeli pawn/propagandist Jeffrey Goldberg quoted an anonymous White House aid as describing Benjamin Netanyahu as "chickenshit" -- evidently for not attacking Iran like the Israelis promised Goldberg they'd do -- so the Israelis got worked up into a snit fit and demanded apoligies, a diplomatic nicety the US didn't bother to demand a few weeks ago when Naftali Bennett accused John Kerry of anti-semitism. Evidently, Netanyahu has a very prickly sensibility, whereas we all know that Obama is used to sloughing off far worse insults. Walt covers the whole "chickenshit-gate" affair here. I've said a lot of things about Netanyahu, but I'd never call a politician who wields nuclear weapons "chickenshit" -- even if he was, I wouldn't dare taunt him.

  Actually, I doubt that Netanyahu is that thin-skinned. Rather, he saw this as an opportunity to remind his supporters how completely he has Obama under his thumb. When Netanyahu came to power in the wake of Obama's victory, I figured it would be short order before his narrow coalition would fall. All the nudge it would take would be a clear signal from Obama that Netanyahu wasn't someone we could work with, and that decision wouldn't take long. There even were a few hints, but nothing Netanyahu couldn't wiggle out of. After a couple years Obama stopped trying, threw in the towel on settlements, and he's been Netanyahu's bitch ever since. For more, see Gideon Levy: Who's the real chickenshit?.

  The United States' policy can only be described as "abject cowardice." Netanyahu, at least, is acting according to his ideology and belief. Obama is acting against his -- and that's pure cowardice. A captive of internal politics and a victim of the de-legitimization campaign in his country, the president didn't have the guts to overcome those obstacles, follow his world view and bring an end to the occupation. Yes, he could. Israel is totally dependent on America and he is America's president. Instead Obama continued the policy of automatic support for Israel, believing, in vain, that flattery will change its policy.

  Obama was destined to be the game changer in the Middle East. When he was elected, he ignited the hope that he would do that. But he preferred to stay with his cowardice. To grovel before Israel and turn his back on the Palestinians. To talk about peace and support Israel's built-in violence.

  Now, in the winter of his career, he is showing signs of being fed up with all this. He can still change things, but not with insults, only with deeds that shake Israel up. Two years are time enough for an American president to make it clear to Israel that its corrupt banquet is over. But for that we need a president who isn't a chickenshit.

• Some stupid politics links (from TPM, where it's impossible to find stories more than two days old, but they carry roughly a dozen like these every week):

  • Santorum: US May Reach Same Level of Religious Persecution as Nazi Germany
  • Fox Host Thinks America Needs 'Older White Guy Appreciation Day'
  • Ben Stein: Obama 'Most Racist President' Ever in America
  • Landrieu's Reference to Race Issues in South Outrages Republicans: She said, "The South has not always been the friendliest place for African-Americans."

  Then there is:

  • 10 insane, fear-mongering GOP lies this election cycle

Also, a few links for further study:

• Larry Diamond: Chasing Away the Democracy Blues: It bothers me when pundits get on their high horse about democracy and use that to dismiss states with basic democratic institutions that offend them for some other reason -- usually that they have elected leaders the US doesn't approve of for one reason or another. Diamond, for instance, doesn't think much of Russia, Iran, Turkey, or Venezuela, but he likes Ukraine much better since a coup deposed its last democratically elected president. Of course, I don't like restrictions on free press like we've seen in Russia and Turkey recently, nor restrictions on who can run for office like those practiced in Iran, but few political systems cannot be improved. I'll add that while I agree with Diamond and virtually everyone else that China is not a democracy, my impression is that the Chinese government is more popular and a more effective public servant than the governments of many nominal democracies. Diamond's US-centric list of democracies -- you don't find Hungary mentioned anywhere, but the antidemocratic laws recently passed there aimed at perpetuating the power of a right-wing party look like something ALEC would work up for the Republicans here -- shows widespread decay which a more balanced list might reduce, but the following paragraph raises an interesting point:

  Like many of you who travel widely, I am increasingly alarmed by how pervasive and corrosive is the worldwide perception -- in both autocracies and democracies -- that American democracy has become dysfunctional and is no longer a model worth emulating. Fortunately, there are many possible models, and most American political scientists never recommended that emerging democracies copy our own excessively veto-ridden institutions. Nevertheless the prestige, the desirability, and the momentum of democracy globally are heavily influenced by perceptions of how it is performing in its leading examples. If we do not mobilize institutional reforms and operational innovations to reduce partisan polarization, encourage moderation and compromise, energize executive functioning, and reduce the outsized influence of money and special interests in our own politics, how are we going to be effective in tackling these kinds of challenges abroad?

  Of course, one answer is that maybe we shouldn't -- especially as long as we seem incapable of distinguishing public interests from the parochial private interests and imperial hubris that dominate US foreign policy. Winston Churchill used to quip that democracy was the worst possible form of government, except for all the rest. I've long thought that the key virtue of democracy was that it offers a way to remove leaders like Winston Churchill from power without having to shoot them. Democracy promises stability even where leadership changes, and stability is reason enough to want to see democracy propagated throughout the world. There are, of course, others, like accountability of leaders to subjects, an essential element of justice, which is in turn essential for the mutual trust that every modern society requires.

• Mark Kleiman: Cannabis Legalization in Oregon: Is Measure 91 Close Enough for Government Work?: I don't get (or care for) all the quibbles, but I am glad to see progress on this front.

• Corey Robin: Jews, Camps, and the Red Cross: Recent research shows that Israel ran several "detention camps" from 1948 into the 1950s where they kept Palestinians as prisoners and subjected them to the usual concentration camp degradations, including forced labor. I'm not sure if this is news -- Israel has run its gulags as long as I can recall, so 1948 is a plausible starting date. I've long known that Israel's military rule regime ran from 1948-67, when it was dismantled a few months before being reconstituted for the Occupied Territories. I've been reading Shira Robinson's Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel's Liberal Settler State, which covers this period fairly well.

• Juliet Schor: Debating the Sharing Economy: A fairly long survey both of commercial and nonprofit sharing organizations with various pluses and minuses -- something that is analogous to my Share the Wealth project but not clear what I want to do. (I suppose the nonprofits are close to what I have in mind, but my own thoughts are far from developed.) Schor has a series of interesting books, the most recent and relevant True Wealth: How and Why Millions of Americans Are Creating a Time-Rich, Ecologically-Light, Small-Scale, High-Satisfaction Economy (2011), which among other things goes into makerspace technology at great length.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Friday, October 31, 2014

Three weeks on the road put a crimp into this month's output: I pushed the deadline out to the end of the month and still only came up with 62 records. Not a lot of finds either, although it's possible that the A-list is getting so full so early -- I currently have 100 records listed (I expected to wind up around 120, but hit 147 last year, after 131 in 2012, 132 in 2011, 132 in 2010, so maybe I'm not that far ahead) -- that I'm starting to think twice before letting anything the least bit marginal in. On the other hand, the two jazz records didn't get in by much, nor did Allo Darlin'. A larger problem is likely the breakdown of my scoutinig network, especially with the demise of Odyshape. Nor has Christgau's return been much help -- he fell so far behind I had heard most of what he's written about (with the usual adjustments up and down).

Most of the old music this month is by Oscar Peterson. I started playing him on the road when I got some flak from over some avant jazz from a piano jazz fan -- figured who could object? I held this month to records up to 1962, chiefly from the 1959 Song Book series (usually composers Peterson surveyed in 1952-54, which many reissues tack onto the later albums). Peterson is a marvelous piano player but he tends to stay in his own comfort zone, using his spectacular technique to dress up rather than deconstruct standards. He raced through the 1954 and 1959 sessions so quickly that he rarely came up with anything new, and when you listen to a lot of them the initial dazzle quickly wears off: so while those albums are uniformly good, none are really great. So the grade average is a bit off, but that's also because I skipped previously graded records, including these A- efforts: At the Concertgebouw (1957); Night Train (1962). I tried to identify Song Book reissues that pick up the 1952-54 material as a bonus, and chose not to split them apart -- in part because the early albums don't seem to be in print anywhere (although you'd think European copyright laws would allow that).

One more thing about Peterson: he was an exceptional accompanist, as is clear from albums like the following:

• Benny Carter: Cosmpolite: The Oscar Peterson Sessions (1952-54 [1994], Verve) A
• Ella Fitzgerald/Louis Armstrong: Ella and Louis (1956 [1985], Verve) A
• Ella Fitzgerald/Louis Armstrong: Ella and Louis Again (1957 [1990], Verve) A+
• Coleman Hawkins: The Genius of Coleman Hawkins (1957 [1997], Verve) A-
• Coleman Hawkins: Coleman Hawkins Encounters Ben Webster (1957 [1992], Verve) A+
• Clark Terry: Oscar Peterson Trio + One: Clark Terry (1964 [1984], Emarcy) A
• Ben Webster: Soulville (1957 [1989], Verve) A
• Ben Webster: Ben Webster Meets Oscar Peterson (1959 [1991], Verve) A-
• Lester Young: The President Plays With the Oscar Peterson Trio (1952 [1997], Verve) A

Peterson remained very productive well into the 1990s, and there is a lot of material on Pablo (his reunion with Norman Granz) that I haven't heard.

The odd-record-out in the old music is the Richmond Fontaine that Christgau singled out in a recent EW post. It's more or less as he says, but my two plays lean toward less, not enough to get me to dig through a catalog with a dozen titles, especially knowing that The High Country only hit B.

Recent compilations include two Rough Guides, a label I continue to loathe -- but it helps me (if not you) that I've largely given up trying to figure when the music comes from. It looks like everything they do now is coming out as 2CD sets. Their pricing suggests grading the first disc alone under its title, then their bonus disc separately as its original release. I'm not sure how well this will work out, or how much I can find, or how much I can stand, but that's working theory for now.

I bought the Spruill set on the recommendation of an EW-fan who declared it the best compilation to have come out in this millennium. I don't quite agree with that judgment, but my wife does.

These are short notes/reviews based on streaming records from Rhapsody. They are snap judgments based on one or two plays, accumulated since my last post along these lines, back on September 30. Past reviews and more information are available here (5468 records).

New Releases (More or Less)

Jhené Aiko: Souled Out (2014, Def Jam): Slotted as an r&b singer, she doesn't really have the voice, but manages to turn that into a charm, at least as long as the beats hold up. B+(*)

Allo Darlin': We Came From the Same Place (2014, Slumberland): Brit guitar-rock group led by Australian singer Elizabeth Morris, third album, all at a very high level. A-

Marcia Ball: The Tattooed Lady and the Alligator Man (2014, Alligator): Blues-singing boogie-woogie pianist from Texas although she's also at home in New Orleans -- check out how Hot Springs is "way up in Arkansas." Always starts with a fast one, and rarely lets up. B+(*)

Kenny Barron/Dave Holland: The Art of Conversation (2014, Blue Note): Piano-bass duets, both masters who have been working since the 1960s -- Barron perhaps most famous for accompanying Stan Getz, Holland associated with Miles Davis and Anthony Braxton, but also a major bandleader of late. Despite both principals having long songbooks on their own, interesting how the Monk pieces stand out. B+(***)

David Binney: Anacapa (2014, Criss Cross): Saxophonist -- lists alto ahead of tenor then soprano and throws in some synths -- backed by John Escreet (piano, FR), two guitarists (Wayne Krantz and Adam Rogers), and electric bass (Matt Brewer). The electronic soup is neither here nor there -- neither grove-centered nor postboppy -- but sometimes the sax prevails. B+(*)

Samuel Blaser/Paul Motian: Consort in Motion (2010 [2011], Kind of Blue): Trombone quartet, with Russ Lossing (piano) and Thomas Morgan (bass). The trombone offers a sort of gruff determination, but by the end everyone is dancing, gingerly, to the drummer's off-kilter riddim. The others help out without being too conspicuous about it. B+(***)

Buck 65: Neverlove (2014, WEA Canada): Canadian rapper, a legend in these parts, turns in an album streaked with his usual brilliance but it's also a major bummer of a breakup album, with "Gates of Hell" opening into "That's the Way Love Dies" and "Love Will Fuck You Up" and more until "She Fades." More often he's rapping against a female vocal backdrop -- Francesca Anderson or Tiger Rosa -- which with his voice veers toward Eminem, who's much clearer about his fucked up relationship(s). B+(**)

François Carrier/Michel Lambert/Alexey Lapin: The Russian Concerts Volume 2 (2013 [2014], FMR): Alto sax, drums, piano, respectively -- the first two close collaborators from Quebec going back to the 1990s, the pianist joining them on five albums now. This one is a shade less consistent and/or impressive than Volume 1 (came out earlier this year). B+(***) [cd]

Jack Clement: For Once and for All (2014, IRS Nashville): Died in 2013, leaving this as his fourth album, including one from 1978 and another credited to Cowboy Jack Clement in 2004 -- if the name seems vaguely familiar, it's probably because he worked as Sam Phillips' engineer during Sun Records' heyday and went on to become an important Nashville producer. This record stakes his claim as a songwriter -- not a lot of classics here, but a couple songs I know well ("Miller's Cave," "Just a Girl I Used to Know") and solid fare, done with a light, gracious touch. B+(***)

Neil Cowley Trio: Touch and Flee (2014, Naim Jazz): British pianist, has a fine touch and rhythmic command that reminds me of semipopular groups like EST -- notable that he cites James Brown as an influence, ahead of Erroll Garner and Ahmad Jamal. Evan Jones (drums) has offered steady support for more than a decade now. B+(*)

Lajos Dudas Quartet: Live at Salzburger Jazzherbst (2012 [2013], Jazz Sick): Clarinetist, b. 1941 in Budapest, Hungary, studied at conservatories named for Béla Bartók and Franz Liszt, long based in Germany. Quartet features longtime collaborator Philipp van Endert on guitar, plus Kurt Billker on drums and Jochen Büttner on percussion. Slow start but ultimately quite lovely, some tasty guitar, and the rhythm helps. A- [cd]

Lajos Dudas Trio: Live at Porgy & Bess (2009 [2013], Jazz Sick): Back cover says "20 Years of Lajos with Philipp, 1993-2013 / The Jubilee CD" but all of this comes from a single date in Vienna, with Philipp van Endert on guitar and Leonard Jones on bass. Four originals, two pieces from Attila Zoller, standards from Monk, Gershwin, and Porter. B+(***) [cd]

Chris Dundas: Oslo Odyssey (2014, BLM, 2CD): Pianist, from Los Angeles, one previous album back in 2000, picks up a band in Norway with bassist Arild Andersen, Patrice Heral on drums, and Bendik Hofseth on tenor sax, and runs on for 1:44:21. The Dundas-composed first disc opens up gracefully for the sax. The improvised second takes a bit longer to find its métier. B+(***) [cd]

Mark Elf: Returns 2014 (2013 [2014], Jen Bay Jazz): Jazz guitarist, has more than a dozen albums since 1987; sounds like he's picked up on the early generation of bop-oriented guitarists, like Herb Ellis and Barney Kessel (or Tal Farlow, the one he has a tribute album for). Backed by a dream band: David Hazletine, Peter Washington, and Lewis Nash, plus some extra percussion on one track. B+(**)

El-P/Killer Mike: Run the Jewels (2013, Fat Beats): Producer and rapper, respectively, the former's deeply shrouded beats sometimes run away with the flow, otherwise are sharp and heavy, while the rapper tries to get his political points in. B+(***)

El-P/Killer Mike: Run the Jewels 2 (2014, Mass Appeal): Usual sequel problems: longer, trying to make up for having shot their best material on the debut. Beats still hard and sharp, and Mike still has things that piss him off. Don't really make him for a killer, though. B+(**)

Bill Frisell: Guitar in the Space Age (2014, Okeh): Aside from two retro-originals, all these songs are buried deep in the 1960s, so the first point that occurs to me is that Frisell is acknowledging that the "space age" is a thing of the now-distant past. You still hear the cliche that "if we can put a man on the moon, we can do x and y," but we haven't put anyone on the moon in more than forty years, so how sure can you be that we still can? Isn't it possible that we've lost that skill to the new Dark Ages? Frisell is old enough to recall when the Space Age meant the future -- I know because I'm his age -- but now it means "Rebel Rouser" and "Pipeline" and "Telstar." That isn't nostalgia, except for a time when we felt like we had a future. B+(***)

Alice Gerrard: Follow the Music (2014, Tompkins Square): Folksinger, up around 80 these days, belonged to the Strange Creek Singers back in the 1960s along with Mike Seeger and Hazel Dickens, but is best known for her duet albums with Dickens, starting with the 1965 classic Pioneering Women of Bluegrass. Way back when her voice moderated Dickens' deep drawl, but as she's started to put together a modest solo career since 1996, Gerrard's voice has gotten strangely distinctive in its own right, especially when she goes a cappella. B+(***)

David Hazeltine: For All We Know (2014, Smoke Sessions): A fine mainstream piano player, his trio the perfect framework for tenor saxophonist Seamus Blake. B+(***)

Benjamin Herman: Trouble (2013 [2014], Dox): Dutch sax trio expanded with piano/keyboards and vocals by Daniel von Piekartz, listened as "featuring" on the cover. The vocals are rather ambiguous sexually, stretched and sentimental -- the sax too, but so much clearer. B+(*)

Darrell Katz and the JCA Orchestra: Why Do You Ride? (2013 [2014], Leo): A big band arranger whose work has been buried on avant labels -- first record on Cadence Jazz in 1993 -- although it's less than clear why: nothing very free here other than his desire to go his own way. This one is built around texts, often involving Albert Einstein, sung by Rebecca Shrimpton, but the most compelling music doesn't have to carry the weight of the words. B+(*) [cd]

Tove Lo: Queen of the Clouds (2014, Island): Swedish electro-pop singer, upbeat but not much fun, nothing much sticks. B

The Mike Longo Trio: Celebrates Oscar Peterson: Live (2013 [2014], CAP): Pianist, worked for Dizzy Gillespie 1966-73, and earlier still studied with Oscar Peterson and played with Red Allen and Coleman Hawkins -- cover has a picture Peterson embracing the young pianist. Celebrating here means playing standards -- fair game since Peterson played all of them with everyone -- so from "Love You Madly" through "Daahoud" the songs carry the album. With Paul West on bass and Ray Mosca on drums. B+(**) [cd]

Branford Marsalis: In My Solitude: Live at Grace Cathedral (2012 [2014], Okeh): Solo sax, no evidence of the Ellington tune but the idea remains, with no effort to stretch the instrument's boundaries, to play up the percussion or such. Rather, you get a very nice "Stardust," an adapted "Sonata in A Minor for Oboe," four minor improvs, and warm applause. B+(**)

Tineke Postma/Greg Osby: Sonic Halo (2013 [2014], Challenge): Two alto saxophonists -- Osby was something of a big deal when he first appeared but he's receded somewhat, possibly because he's taken second billing on a number of albums. (Friendly Fire with Joe Lovano was one of the first.) Here he's meshed completely with Postma. Quintet is superb all around with Matt Mitchell especially striking on piano, Linda Oh on bass, and Dan Weiss on drums. B+(***)

Angaleena Presley: American Middle Class (2014, Saddle Creek): Debut album from the last third of the Pistol Annies to make the move, and probably the best of the bunch. Noteworthy that the title song sees union membership as the key to middle class identity. A-

Prince: Art Official Age (2014, Warner Brothers): For some reason seems like an artist far removed from present concerns, even though I have to look back less than a decade to find not one but two A- records (2004's Musicology and 2006's 3121) -- it's just that I have no recollection of either, so I'm reluctant to grant too much to the perfunctory funk tracks here. B+(**)

Prince/3rdEyeGirl: Plectrum Electrum (2014, Warner Brothers): Could be the "all-female power trio" should get top billing -- I've seen this printed both ways. "Power trio" seems to mean they've memorized all of Cream's bass lines but they're less monumental when they sing. B+(*)

Joshua Redman: Trios Live (2009-13 [2014], Nonesuch): Sax trios, from two sets (hence two token soprano cuts), both with Gregory Hutchinson on drums, Matt Penman and Reuben Rodgers the bassists. After various conceptual missteps, nice to just hear him blow. [Rhapsody has 5/7 tracks]. B+(**)

Sylvain Rifflet & Jon Irabagon: Perpetual Motion: A Celebration of Moondog (2013 [2014], Jazz Village): Louis Hardin (1916-99), aka the Viking of 6th Avenue, aka Moondog, is a SFFR (Subject For Future Research), someone I've long meant to check out but never have. Like Hardin, both leaders play tenor sax, Rifflet with a couple albums, Irabagon with a more auspicious resume. The instrumental passages are intriguing, the saxes strong, but I'm unclear how the chorus should fit in -- seems like a distraction so far. B+(*)

Rafael Rosa: Portrait (2014, self-released): Puerto Rican guitarist, based in Brooklyn, seems to be his first album, runs warm and lyrical, playing up the guest spots and leaving plenty room for saxophonist Edmar Colon. B+(**)

Matthew Shipp: I've Been to Many Places (2014, Thirsty Ear): One of the great jazz pianist of the last thirty-so years, with yet another solo album -- I must admit I'm getting a little tired of those, not necessarily because this one seems to be thicker and heavier than usual. B+(*)

Wadada Leo Smith/Bill Laswell: The Stone (Akashic Meditation) (2014, MOD Technologies): Trumpet-bass duo, one 38-minute cut, stark and meditative. B+(*)

Spoke: (R)anthems (2013 [2014], River): Two-horn quartet -- Andy Hunter (trombone), Justin Wood (alto sax, flute) -- backed with bass and drums, plus congas on two cuts. Tightly knit postbop, including covers from Mingus and Monk (and the unspeakable "Blackbird"). B+(*) [cd]

Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives: Saturday Night/Sunday Morning (2014, Superlatone, 2CD): Ralph Stanley used the same concept and title c. 1992, but bluegrass is always looking back. The band earns its name especially on the upbeat first disc, while the singer (presumably Stuart) does a fairly grizzled Jerry Lee impression. The gospel side generally avoids the obvious, and sometimes suggests they're not really done with Saturday night. B+(*)

Tricky: Adrian Thaws (2014, !K7): Not the first alias to release an album after his original name -- Richard D. James came first to mind, but Marshall Mathers is more famous. Touches on most of his career, throwing out such a range of poses it's hard to tell who's putting on whom. B+(***)

Ulf Wakenius: Solo: Momento Magico (2013 [2014], ACT): Swedish guitarist, played with Oscar Peterson, has a couple fine albums dedicated to pianists so he has a fine sense of melody. Solo he goes for thick chords, adding gravitas to an intrinsically lite album. B+(*)

Ezra Weiss Sextet: Before You Know It: Live in Portland (2013 [2014], Roark): Pianist, based in Portland, sixth album since 2003, including some "children's musicals" I've neglected and The Shirley Horn Suite (which I rather liked). What lifts this above the postbop norm is some growl and fury in the horns (Farnell Newton on trumpet, John Nastos on alto sax, Devin Phillips on tenor). And after they warm up the joint, he closes with a really lovely ballad. A- [cd]

Dann Zinn: Shangri La (2014, self-released): Tenor saxophonist, also plays processed sax and wood flute here, cut his first album in 1996. This one is a trio with Chris Robinson on guitar (etc.) and Peter Erskine on drums (etc.). Originals except for Brahms, Puccini, and Green Day -- not much appeal there. B [cd]

Reissues, Compilations, Vault Discoveries

Charlie Haden/Jim Hall: Charlie Haden/Jim Hall (1990 [2014], Impulse): Guitarist Hall died last year, followed by bassist Haden this year, so some nostalgia is in order. This was recorded at the Montreal Jazz Festival in 1990, a year after the many volumes of The Montreal Tapes, a festival that recapitulated much of the bassist's career. Haden has done guitar duets -- Egberto Gismonti (1989) and Pat Metheny (1996) -- but he is especially tuned into Hall, whose often understated style ripens luxuriously here. A-

Jerry Heldman: Revelation(s) (1973-74 [2014], Origin, 2CD): Credited here with acoustic bass, piano, flute, and vocals), a longtime fixture on the Seattle jazz scene, died in 2013 at age 76. Not sure if any of his work had previously been released -- cursory search suggests not. Starts with a Bible reading (I could do without), then saunters into some period fusion with Sam Lipuma on guitar and bassist David Friesen sometimes taking over the piano. B [cd]

Oscar Peterson: Plays the Harry Warren & Vincent Youmans Song Books (1952-59 [2014], Solar, 2CD): Between July 19 and August 9, 1959, Peterson's trio -- Ray Brown on bass and Ed Thigpen on drums -- recorded virtually the whole of the "songbooks" series, a pace which didn't produce much innovation but showcased their chops and let the songs shine. It was his second troll through Warren and Youmans, the first occurring for a pair of 1954 LPs with Brown and Barney Kessel or Herb Ellis on guitar, so those LPs are the source of most of the "bonus tracks" -- the other find is a 12:52 "Tea for Two" from a live shot in 1952. B+(***)

Oscar Peterson: Plays the Richard Rodgers Song Book (1954-59 [2014], Solar): Most likely the same deal, with his 1954 Plays Richard Rodgers tacked on as a bonus to the 1959 frog march through the hits, although I'm not sure that's all -- e.g., where did the odd vocal come from? B+(**)

Oscar Peterson: Plays the Irving Berlin Song Book (1952-59 [2014], Solar): Mostly such marvelous songs that Peterson's magical touch adds surprisingly little, while the occasional slip makes you wonder how such a thing could happen. Again, looks like two albums tacked together, the 1957 (recorded 1952) Plays Irving Berlin tacked onto the 1960 (recorded 1959) songbook album. B+(***)

Oscar Peterson: Plays the Jimmy McHugh Song Book (1954-59 [2014], Solar): Tunes written for the Cotton Club in the 1920s are highlights here, again given two treatments, one with bass and guitar from 1954 and the later one with bass and drums. B+(**)

The Rough Guide to Arabic Jazz ([2014], World Music Network, 2CD): Traditional Arabic music has long had an affinity to jazz, but that prospect has only sporadically been developed in recent years, leading to this skimpy and eclectic collection: the best known musicians here are Lebanese oudist Rabih Abou-Khalil and French bassist Renaud Garcia Fons, aside from Cuban percussionist Roberto Rodriguez (exploring a Sephardic riff with Tunisian pianist Maurice El Médioni -- the highpoint of the album but the least Arabic thing here). B+(*)
Bonus Disc: Hijaz: Chemsi (2011, Zephyrus): Based in Belgium, with Moufadhel Adhoum on oud providing the Arabic component, Niko Deman on piano, Vincent Noiret on bass, and Chryster Aerts on drums, plus various guests on violin, duduk, ney, tabla, and percussion. B+(**)

The Rough Guide to Bollywood Disco (1965-93 [2014], World Music Network, 2CD): Film music, but given how often Bollywood breaks out in dance it must not have been hard to program an ear-opening compilation. Also, for once, relatively easy to check the dates, since the songs are keyed to films. The pre-disco Manna Dey is a highlight, suggesting that some day we'll see a Rough Guide to Bollywood Twist and Shout. B+(***)
Bonus disc: Kishore Kumar: The Rough Guide to Kishore Kumar ([2014], World Music Network): Kumar (1929-87) scored three songs on the main disc. Don't know where or when these come from. B+(**)

Wild Jimmy Spruill: Scratchin': The Wild Jimmy Spruill Story (1956-63 [2014], GVC, 2CD): An r&b guitarist (1934-96), Spruill cut a few sides under his own name but his story is spread out in session work, especially for producers Danny and Bobby Robinson at Fire, Fury, and other New York labels. This collects 61 songs, bracketted by two Wilbert Harrison songs, his big hit "Kansas City" and eventual sequel, "Goodbye Kansas City." Not much else here is as famous, although Solomon Burke and the Shirelles show hints of major talent, but unfamiliarity opens up the era to fresh ears. A

Lester Young: Boston, 1950 (1950 [2013], Uptown): Recently discovered radio shots, with Jesse Drakes on trumpet, Kenny Drew on piano, Connie Kay on drums, various bassists, running through standards with Steve Allison or Symphony Sid as MC. B+(*)

Old Music

Oscar Peterson: The Oscar Peterson Trio at Zardi's (1955 [1994], Pablo/OJC, 2CD): Live trio with Herb Ellis on guitar (and occasional percussive effects) and Ray Brown on bass. Hard to quibble with, or to fault Ellis when he manages to break loose. A-

Oscar Peterson: Plays My Fair Lady (1958, Verve): Piano trio, with Ray Brown and Gene Gammage, playing songs from Lerner and Loewe's hit musical. B+(**)

Oscar Peterson: Plays the Harold Arlen Song Book (1954-59 [2001], Verve): The prototype for the recent Solar reissues above, combining Peterson's 1954 Plays Harold Arlen with his 1959 Plays the Harold Arlen Song Book, replacing guitarist Herb Ellis with drummer Ed Thigpen for the latter. B+(**)

Oscar Peterson: Plays the Cole Porter Song Book (1959 [1990], Verve): Just the 12-cut album from the 1959 "song book" round, although I imagine it's only a matter of time before someone pads this out with cuts from 1951-52's Plays Cole Porter -- the first such album Peterson cut. Actually, the brevity is a relief after listening to many songbook combos, but one still feels that the mass production of the 1959 sessions missed some opportunities. B+(***)

Oscar Peterson: Plays the George Gershwin Song Book (1952-59 [1996], Verve): Padded to 24 cuts with the 1954 Plays George Gershwin packed onto one disc. The early sessions with Barney Kessel (guitar) stand out. B+(***)

Oscar Peterson: Plays the Duke Ellington Song Book (1952-59 [1999], Verve): Another twofer, picking up the 1952 Plays Duke Ellington (with Barney Kessel on guitar) along with the 1959 trio sessions. B+(***)

Oscar Peterson: A Jazz Portrait of Frank Sinatra (1959 [1990], Verve): Twelve songs, so snappy most don't top three minutes and only one makes it to 3:41 (total: 25:25). Sinatra needed a full big band to swing these tunes, but the trio is more than enough, the piano so bright you hardly miss the vocals -- in part because you're bound to sing along. B+(***)

The Oscar Peterson Trio: Fiorello (1960, Verve): Songs from the Broadway musical -- add an exclamation mark for the title -- by Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock based on the life of New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. B+(*)

Oscar Peterson Trio: West Side Story (1962, Verve): Songs from the hit Broadway musical by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, although the only one you run across much in the standards repertoire is "Somewhere." B

Oscar Peterson: The Jazz Soul of Oscar Peterson/Affinity (1959-62 [1996], Verve): Two trio albums -- Ray Brown on bass, Ed Thigpen on drums -- packed onto a single CD, with much more of the bright, fast postbop they've always excelled in. B+(**)

Richmond Fontaine: Winnemucca (2002, El Cortez): After reviewing a pile of Willy Vlautin novels, Christgau jotted down a HM squib for Vlautin's female-fronted Delines debut, then decided this old Vlautin-fronted album was the prize of more than a dozen dating back to 1997. Off and on it is, but Colfax impressed me more. B+(***)

Matthew Shipp/Guillermo E. Brown: Telephone Popcorn (2005 [2008], Nu Bop): Piano-drums duo, two members of David S. Ware Quartet at the time. B+(*)

Revised Grades

Sometimes further listening leads me to change an initial grade, usually either because I move on to a real copy, or because someone else's review or list makes me want to check it again:

Oscar Peterson: Plays the Jerome Kern Song Book (1959 [2009], Verve): One of the best sets to roll off the 1959 assembly line, perhaps because the juxtaposition of the bright fast ones and the delicate slow ones works to benefit both. [was: B+(**)] B+(***)

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Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Music: Current count 23933 [23893] rated (+40), 543 [526] unrated (+17).

Back from three weeks on the road. I did manage to file a few blog posts with link comments, but there wasn't much I could do with Music Week, or indeed much to do until I got back. The incoming mail jumped up a level while I was gone. I didn't take any new CDs with me. I did take a Chromebook and listen to Rhapsody and jotted down a few record reviews, but I didn't have a lot of time for that. (I got flak for playing Wadada Leo Smith, so wound up switching to Oscar Peterson, but I wasn't able to sort out the songbooks until I got home.)

I also fell out of the habit of writing tweet-length review lines, and it doesn't seem like it would either be fun or all that useful to try to catch up at this point. I'm due to post a Rhapsody Streamnotes before the end of October, so you'll get the reviews soon enough. I only have about 50 notes in the draft file, so it will likely be the shortest one all year, but those are the breaks.

I'll resume the grade-tweets after this post. One thing on my "todo" list is to update the Music Tracking 2014 file. One thing not on my "todo" list is to organize another Turkey Shoot on Thanksgiving. I wouldn't mind running it if someone else stepped forward (or you could, as Christgau suggested to me, self-publish it on Medium). I am leaning toward doing a metacritic file based on year-end lists (as opposed to previous years when I folded year-long review data in). And I expect there will be a Jazz Critics Poll, but don't have any details yet.

New records rated over the previous three weeks:

• Jhené Aiko: Souled Out (2014, Def Jam): [r]: B+(*)
• Kenny Barron/Dave Holland: The Art of Conversation (2014, Blue Note): [r]: B+(***)
• David Binney: Anacapa (2014, Criss Cross): [r]: B+(*)
• Samuel Blaser/Paul Motian: Consort in Motion (2010 [2011], Kind of Blue): [r]: B+(***)
• Buck 65: Neverlove (2014, WEA Canada): [r]: B+(**)
• Lajos Dudas Trio: Live at Porgy & Bess (2009 [2013], Jazz Sick): [cd]: B+(***)
• Lajos Dudas Quartet: Live at Salzburger Jazzherbst (2012 [2013], Jazz Sick): [cd]: A-
• El-P/Killer Mike: Run the Jewels (2013, Fat Beats): [r]: B+(***)
• El-P/Killer Mike: Run the Jewels 2 (2014, Mass Appeal): [r]: B+(**)
• Bill Frisell: Guitar in the Space Age (2014, Okeh): [r]: B+(***)
• David Hazeltine: For All We Know (2014, Smoke Sessions): [r]: B+(***)
• Branford Marsalis: In My Solitude: Live at Grace Cathedral (2012 [2014], Okeh): [r]: B+(**)
• Angaleena Presley: American Middle Class (2014, Slate Creek): [r]: A-
• Joshua Redman: Trios Live (2009-13 [2014], Nonesuch): [r]: B+(**)
• Rafael Rosa: Portrait (2014, self-released): [cd]: B+(**)
• Spoke: (R)anthems (2013 [2014], River): [cd]: B+(*)
• Wadada Leo Smith/Bill Laswell: The Stone (Akashic Meditation) (2014, MOD Technologies): [r]: B+(*)
• Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives: Saturday Night/Sunday Morning (2014, Superlatone, 2CD): [r]: B+(*)
• Dann Zinn: Shangri La (2014, self-released): [cd]: B

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:

• Jerry Heldman: Revelation(s) (1973-74 [2014], Origin, 2CD): [cd]: B
• Oscar Peterson: Plays the Harry Warren & Vincent Youmans Song Books (1952-59 [2014], Solar, 2CD): [r]: B+(***)
• Oscar Peterson: Plays the Richard Rodgers Song Book (1954-59 [2014], Solar): [r]: B+(**)
• Oscar Peterson: Plays the Irving Berlin Song Book (1952-59 [2014], Solar): [r]: B+(***)
• Oscar Peterson: Plays the Jimmy McHugh Song Book (1954-59 [2014], Solar): [r]: B+(**)
• Lester Young: Boston, 1950 (1950 [2013], Uptown): [r]: B+(*)

Old records rated this week:

• Oscar Peterson: The Oscar Peterson Trio at Zardi's (1954 [1994], Pablo/OJC, 2CD): [r]: A-
• Oscar Peterson: Plays My Fair Lady (1958, Verve): [r]: B+(**)
• Oscar Peterson: Plays the Harold Arlen Song Book (1954-59 [2001], Verve): [r]: B+(**)
• Oscar Peterson: Plays the Cole Porter Song Book (1959 [1990], Verve): [r]: B+(***)
• Oscar Peterson: Plays the George Gershwin Song Book (1952-59 [1996], Verve): [r]: B+(***)
• Oscar Peterson: Plays the Duke Ellington Song Book (1952-59 [1999], Verve): [r]: B+(***)
• Oscar Peterson: A Jazz Portrait of Frank Sinatra (1959 [1990], Verve): [r]: B+(***)
• Oscar Peterson: Fiorello (1960, Verve): [r]: B+(*)
• Oscar Peterson Trio: West Side Story (1962, Verve): [r]: B
• Oscar Peterson: The Jazz Soul of Oscar Peterson/Affinity (1959-62 [1996], Verve): [r]: B+(**)
• Richmond Fontaine: Winnemucca (2002, El Cortez): [r]: B+(***)

Grade changes:

• Oscar Peterson: Plays the Jerome Kern Songbook (1959 [2009], Verve): [was: B+(**)] B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last three weeks:

• Greg Abate Quartet: Motif (Whaling City Sound)
• Allison Au Quartet: The Sky Was Pale Blue, Then Grey (self-released)
• David Borbo & Paul Pellegrin: Kronomorfic Entangled (Origin)
• Nels Cline & Julian Lage: Room (Mack Avenue): advance, November 25
• Freddy Cole: Singing the Blues (High Note)
• Kevin Conlon/The Groove Rebellion: In Transit (Blujazz)
• Michael Denhoff/Uli Phillipp/Jörg Fischer: Trio Improvisations for Campanula, Bass and Percussion (Sporeprint)
• Expansions: The Dave Liebman Group: Samsara (Whaling City Sound)
• Jean Luc Fillon: Oboman Plays Cole Porter: Begin the Night . . . (Soupir Editions)
• Brad Goode Quartet: Montezuma (Origin)
• Jonathan Kreisberg: Wave Upon Wave (New for Now Music)
• Thomas Marriott: Urban Folklore (Origin)
• Delfeayo Marsalis: The Last Southern Gentlemen (Troubadour Jass)
• Sam Newsome: The Straight Horn of Africa: A Path to Liberation [The Art of the Soprano, Vol. 2] (self-released)
• Clarence Penn & Penn Station: Monk: The Lost Files (Origin)
• Rex Richardson & Steve Wilson: Blue Shift (Summit)
• Boris Savoldelli/Garrison Fewell: Electric Bat Conspiracy (Creative Nation Music)
• Ryan Schultz Quintet: Hair Dryers (Origin)
• Pat Senatore Trio: Ascensione (Fresh Sound)
• Judy Silvano with Michael Abene: My Dance (JSL): January 6
• Tyshawn Sorey: Alloy (Pi)
• The Spin Quartet: In Circles (Origin)
• Lyn Stanley: Potions (A.T. Music)
• Brian Swartz & the Gnu Sextet: Portraiture (Summit)
• Natsuki Tamura/Alexander Frangenheim: Max (Creative Sources)
• Touch and Go Sextet: Live at the Novara Jazz Festival (Nine Winds)
• Marlene VerPlanck: I Give Up, I'm in Love (Audiophile)
• Walter White: Most Triumphant (Summit)
• Jason Yeager Trio: Affirmation (Inner Circle Music)
• Peter Zak Trio: The Disciple (Steeplechase)
• Miguel Zenón: Identities Are Changeable (Miel Music): November 4

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Sunday, October 26, 2014

Having jotted down one or two of these on the road, I figured on doing a Sunday links column, followed by a Monday music column, just like normal times. Didn't work out that way, but thanks to the magic of back-dating my tardiness will eventually be forgotten.

• Alex Henderson: Rise of the American police state: 9 disgraceful events that paved the way: Let's just list 'em:

  1. Ronald Reagan Escalates the War on Drugs
  2. Rodney King Beating of 1991
  3. 9/11 Terrorist Attacks
  4. Waterboarding and Torture at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base
  5. Growth and Expansion of Asset Forfeiture Laws
  6. National Defense Authorization Act and Erosion of Habeas Corpus
  7. Department of Homeland Security Promoting Militarization of Local Police Departments
  8. Growth of the Prison/Industrial Complex
  9. NYPD Assault on Occupy Wall Street

  Note that nothing facilitates the creation of a police state like war -- even pretend-wars like the one on drugs, but see how the pace picks up with 2001?

• Paul Krugman: The Invisible Moderate: A more accurate assessment of Obama than the one Krugman put forth in his Rolling Stone puff piece:

  I actually agree with a lot of what David Brooks says today. But -- you know there has to be a "but" -- so does a guy named Barack Obama. Which brings me to one of the enduringly weird aspects of our current pundit discourse: constant calls for a moderate, sensible path that supposedly lies between the extremes of the two parties, but is in fact exactly what Obama has been proposing. [ . . . ]

  Well, the Obama administration would love to spend more on infrastructure; the problem is that a major spending bill has no chance of passing the House. And that's not a problem of "both parties" -- it's the GOP blocking it. Exactly how many Republicans would be willing to engage in deficit spending to expand bus networks? (Remember, these are the people who consider making rental bicycles available an example of "totalitarian" rule.) [ . . . ]

  It's an amazing thing: Obama is essentially what we used to call a liberal Republican, who faces implacable opposition from a very hard right. But Obama's moderation is hidden in plain sight, apparently invisible to the commentariat.

  Actually, when I think of Obama as a "liberal Republican" I flash back to an earlier Illinois senator, Charles Percy, who was better on foreign policy and no worse on economics or civil rights than Obama. But Obama doesn't have the luxury of being a liberal Republican, or for that matter a centrist Democrat. Today's Republicans allow no such luxury, nor do today's problems. As far back as 1998, Jim Hightower warned: "there's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos." Today there's just more roadkill.

  By the way, Krugman's too kind to Brooks, whom he quotes as saying, "the government should reduce its generosity to people who are not working but increase its support for people who are. That means reducing health benefits for the affluent elderly . . ." You may wonder why the party of the rich proposes adding means tests to Medicare. It's because they don't want anyone to think they have a right to medical care.

• Seth McElwee: Why Turning Out the Vote Makes a Huge Difference in Four Charts: The charts show that non-voters are consistently more liberal than voters, which reinforces the by-now-conventional view that Democrats win when then can get the vote out, while the key for Republican gains is voter suppression. This doesn't go into the question of why non-voters don't vote, even though voting is one of the few ways they have to advance their own interests. Clearly one reason is that the economic costs of voting (which include things like the time it takes to vote) are high enough to suppress turnout. Another likely reason is widespread cynicism about politicians -- especially about Democrats, who appeal for public support on election day but more often than not spend the rest of their time triangulating between interest group lobbies, raising money that they often see as more valuable in securing reëlection than any work they do to benefit their constituents.

  When voter turnout is discussed in public it is often treated as a civic obligation, rather than a means to advance individual interests. Republican candidates often denounce low-income voters for voting for the party that best advances their class interests (while at the same time supporting massive tax cuts for their rich constituents). Yet when Benjamin Page interview the rich he finds that they, "acknowledged a focus on fairly narrow economic self-interest" when discussing their engagement in the political process. In this way, the recent Lil' Jon video, "Turnout For What," while tacky, has reframed the voting as a means to forward political interests, rather than as a civic obligation. Since some 41 percent of non-voters claim that their vote wouldn't matter, this message is important. It's also important to remove barriers to voting. Research by Jame Avery and Mark Peffley finds, "states with restrictive voter registration laws are much more likely to be biased toward upper-class turnout." In contrast, states that have adopted same-day registration and vigorously enforced the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) have lower levels of class bias in their electorate. Research also suggests that unions are an important mechanism for low and middle income voters to engage with the political process. Attempts to disempower than should also be viewed through the lens of voter suppression.

  Indeed, Republican opposition to unions seems to have more to do with reducing their political effectiveness than as a favor to the rich. Since their blip in 2010, when Obama voters took a nap, Republicans have seized the opportunity to do as much as they could to suppress voting (as well as to distort it through the infusion of extraordinary sums of money). I expect this to produce some kind of backlash -- the message for those who bother to pay attention is that your vote must be worth something, otherwise why would they be so eager to take it away? -- but thus far the clearest message is how shameless Republicans have become about their desire to exclude a really large segment of the American people. For more on voter suppression efforts, see Jeffrey Toobin: Freedom Summer, 2015 (and from 2012, Jane Mayer: The Voter-Fraud Myth).

• Paul Woodward: Terrorism exists in the eye of the beholder: I was in Arkansas Tuesday [October 22], when a soldier on duty at a "war memorial" in Ottawa [Canada] was shot by a lone gunman, presumably the person shot and killed later that day in Canada's Parliament building. The TV was tuned into CNN, where they spent the entire day blabbing on and on based on scant information and fervid imagination. The shooter was later identified as Michael Zehaf-Bibeau.

  In 2012 there were seven murders in Ottawa (population close to a million), 2013 nine murders, and so far in 2014 there have been five (including yesterday's).

  The overwhelming majority of the crazy men running round shooting innocent people are on this side of the border. What makes them dangerous is much less the ideas in their heads than the ease with which they can lay their hands on a gun.

  It's often hard to be clear about what should be described as terrorism. What's much easier to discern is hysteria.

  By the way, Zehaf-Bibeau's gun was evidently a Winchester Model 94 lever-action rifle, a design that dates back to 1894 and is limited to eight rounds, which have to be individually loaded -- a very inefficient choice for a "shooting rampage."

  Then on Friday [October 24], a high school student in suburban Seattle went on his own shooting rampage, killing two and injuring three more before shooting himself. I missed CNN's wall-to-wall coverage (assuming that's what they did), but it's safe to guess that the talking heads spent much less time speculating on the shooter's ties to ISIS. For one thing, shooting each other is just something Americans do.

• I don't have time to dig through Israel's recent garbage, but if you do here are some typical links from Mondoweiss:
  • Jebreal debunks Netanyahu's 'American values' claim in NYT piece on 'hate policies': on Kula Jebreal's NYT op-ed, Minority Life in Israel.
  • Under pretext of restoring calm, Netanyahu government is escalating Israel's war on Palestinians in Jerusalem.
  • Kerry just snubbed a gov't minister who calls for segregated bus lines. And that's a bad thing?.
  • Israeli army kills 14-year-old Palestinian with US citizenship.
  • Kate: Under cover of night, nine Jewish families take over two buildings in Silwan: news clippings to October 22; one example: "a Palestinian hit-and-run suspect is sent to prison and winds up dead; a Jew suspected of a similar but deadlier crime in the West Bank is sent home to his family."
  • Anti-semitism charge is increasingly being leveled against Israel's mainstream critics: e.g., by Naftali Bennett against John Kerry.
  • Kate: Settlers in Jerusalem tear down family's Islamic banners, give them to a dog: news clips to October 18.
  • Ethnic Cleansing by All Means: The real Israeli 'peace' policy.
  • As Kerry scrambles to prevent Palestinian action at UN, Israeli govt makes it clear it will never accept Palestinian state.
  • How Israel relies on Islamophobia: Netanyahu: "Hamas is ISIS, ISIS is Hamas."
  • British Parliament votes overwhelmingly to recognize Palestinian state.
  • Kate: Israeli settlers terrorize annual Palestinian oliver harvest: news clips to October 13.
  • In the last days of 'Operation Protective Edge' Israel focused on its final goal -- the destruction of Gaza's professional class.
  • Knesset shell game: Aid meant for Israeli towns affected by Gaza war sent to illegal settlements instead.
  • Netanyahu lectures Americans on open housing and 'ethnic purification'.

Also, a few links for further study:

• Tom Engelhardt: Entering the Intelligence Labyrinth: An introduction, or precis, of Engelhardt's new book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World (paperback, Haymarket Books). It bears repeating that the US annually spends $68 billion on 17 major "intelligence" agencies -- sorry for the quotes but it's hard to think of them without choking on that word -- that do, well, what exactly? Sorry, that's a secret, but thanks to the occasional leak or boast we do know a wee bit:

  You build them glorious headquarters. You create a global surveillance state for the ages. You listen in on your citizenry and gather their communications in staggering quantities. Your employees even morph into avatars and enter video-game landscapes, lest any Americans betray a penchant for evil deeds while in entertainment mode. You collect information on visits to porn sites just in case, one day, blackmail might be useful. You pass around naked photos of them just for . . . well, the salacious hell of it. Your employees even use aspects of the system you've created to stalk former lovers and, within your arcane world, that act of "spycraft" gains its own name: LOVEINT.

  You listen in on foreign leaders and politicians across the planet. You bring on board hundreds of thousands of crony corporate employees, creating the sinews of an intelligence-corporate complex of the first order. You break into the "backdoors" of the data centers of major Internet outfits to collect user accounts. You create new outfits within outfits, including an ever-expanding secret military and intelligence crew embedded inside the military itself (and not counted among those 17 agencies). Your leaders lie to Congress and the American people without, as far as we can tell, a flicker of self-doubt. Your acts are subject to secret courts, which only hear your versions of events and regularly rubberstamp them -- and whose judgments and substantial body of lawmaking are far too secret for Americans to know about.

  You have put extraordinary effort into ensuring that information about your world and the millions of documents you produce doesn't make it into our world. You even have the legal ability to gag American organizations and citizens who might speak out on subjects that would displease you (and they can't say that their mouths have been shut). You undoubtedly spy on Congress. You hack into congressional computer systems. And if whistleblowers inside your world try to tell the American public anything unauthorized about what you're doing, you prosecute them under the Espionage Act, as if they were spies for a foreign power (which, in a sense, they are, since you treat the American people as if they were a foreign population). You do everything to wreck their lives and -- should one escape your grasp -- you hunt him implacably to the ends of the Earth.

  As for your top officials, when their moment is past, the revolving door is theirs to spin through into a lucrative mirror life in the intelligence-corporate complex. [ . . . ]

  Keep in mind that the twenty-first-century version of intelligence began amid a catastrophic failure: much crucial information about the 9/11 hijackers and hijackings was ignored or simply lost in the labyrinth. That failure, of course, led to one of the great intelligence expansions, or even explosions, in history. (And mind you, no figure in authority in the national security world was axed, demoted, or penalized in any way for 9/11 and a number of them were later given awards and promoted.) However they may fail, when it comes to their budgets, their power, their reach, their secrecy, their careers, and their staying power, they have succeeded impressively.

  Speaking of secrets, also see: Nick Turse: Uncovering the Military's Secret Military (back from 2011, more relevant than ever):

  In 120 countries across the globe, troops from Special Operations Command carry out their secret war of high-profile assassinations, low-level targeted killings, capture/kidnap operations, kick-down-the-door night raids, joint operations with foreign forces, and training missions with indigenous partners as part of a shadowy conflict unknown to most Americans. Once "special" for being small, lean, outsider outfits, today they are special for their power, access, influence, and aura.

  That aura now benefits from a well-honed public relations campaign which helps them project a superhuman image at home and abroad, even while many of their actual activities remain in the ever-widening shadows. Typical of the vision they are pushing was this statement from Admiral Olson: "I am convinced that the forces . . . are the most culturally attuned partners, the most lethal hunter-killers, and most responsive, agile, innovative, and efficiently effective advisors, trainers, problem-solvers, and warriors that any nation has to offer."

  I suspect that the main target of that propaganda campaign is the president, to drive home the point that "special forces" are a no-risk, high-return, small scale option for any problem that can be solved simply (with a bullet, that is).

• Rory Fanning: Why Do We Keep Thanking the Troops?: I can't be the only person who finds the constant adulation given to the "troops" of the US military downright disgusting, but it sure is hard to find anyone saying so in print. America has always cultivated hypocrisy, and those in my generation suffered through more than usual dose. We noted the beginnings of a cult of the troops in the Vietnam War, where failure on the battlefield was ever-more-generously decorated with medals, but memory was too close to WWII to get carried away: WWII was an intense, all-encompassing collective effort; with so few uninvolved it would have seemed silly to declare everyone a hero (although as memory dimmed that eventually happened with the "greatest generation" hype). The obvious excuse for putting troops on a pedestal today is that so few people sign up (and many of them are tricked into thinking it's some sort of jobs program). Still, this idolatry obscures one of the fundamental political questions of our time: do the sacrifices of US troops do any good for the vast majority of Americans who are otherwise uninvolved? The answer, I'm certain, is no. If all the US had done after 9/11/2001 was to put out a few Interpol warrants, I doubt that even the tiny number of "terrorist attacks" we've seen since would have happened. Had we practiced policies in the Middle East favoring democracy and basic human rights for all but eschewing intervention and arms sales we probably would have missed out on 9/11 (and both Gulf Wars). Sure, the troops had no real say in the decision to squander their lives in a vain attempt to buttress the Neocon ego, but I'm not so sure they shouldn't shoulder some of the blame. Back in the Vietnam War days there was a popular saying: "suppose they gave a war and nobody came." We were under no illusion that most of those who "came" for the war then were compelled to do so. I can understand, and even sympathize, how one might succumb to the force of the state -- I did, after all, feel that force -- but for me that made those who resisted, either by going to jail or avoiding that fate, were the era's real heroes; nothing one could do in battle came close. Since the draft ended, the choice to deny the war machine its bodies is less fraught, and indeed most people choose that path. So today's troops range from malevolent to the merely misinformed, but they all help to enable a set of policies that ultimately do massive harm to the nation and its people. And often, of course, they do great harm to themselves, adding to the public costs of war. (Aside from the dead and maimed, Fanning mentions that "there is a veteran suicide every 80 minutes in this country," nor does the PTSD stop there.) Of course, there are more nuances to the whole phenomenon, but at root is a common misconception that those who "served" did something to protect the rest of us, something that we all should be grateful for. That simply did not happen. That they sacrificed for something we should regret and be embarrassed by, well, that's more to the point. Only once we recognize that can we get past the charades, and that will be better for all of us.

• David Bromwich: American Exceptionalism and Its Discontents: Speaking of hypocrisies, here's the hoary mother lode, the notion that we're so special the world wouldn't know what to do without our enlightened guidance. Needless to say, the tone has changed over time. Once America was unique in declaring that "all men are created equal"; today our self-esteem is the very celebration of inequality.

• David Gerald Finchman: The hidden documents that reveal the true borders of Israel and Palestine: In 1947 David Ben Gurion begged the UN to vote in favor of partition borders for Palestine which would give 55% of the mandate to a majority-Jewish nation that represented only 35% of the total population, and 45% to an almost exclusively Arabic-speaking nation. In 1948 Israel's Declaration of Independence proclaimed a Jewish State but said nothing about borders. This unwillingness to define borders has kept Israel in a state of war ever since, with Israel grabbing another 23% of the Mandate's territory during the 1947-49 war, and the remaining 22% in 1967 (plus chunks of Egypt and Syria). This piece looks into the decision-making process from UN-borders to no-borders. A longer version is available here.

• Karen Greenberg: Will the US Go to "War" Against Ebola? It's telling that Obama's initial response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa was to send in the US military. That made some sense inasmuch as AFRICOM has money to burn and some expertise in logistics, but it also imposes a rigid worldview and introduces a dangerous level of intimidation. The one thing Ebola does have in common with Terrorism is an exaggerated level of hysteria, but that seems of a piece with the media's highly orchestrated kneejerk reactions. I'm reminded of the anthrax scare of 2001, which would have soon gone freaking insane had the perpetrator not had the good sense to stop. Greenberg points out many ways Ebola differs from the Terrorism model.

• Louis Menand: Crooner in Rights Spat: A useful review of copyright matters:

  Baldwin joins Saint-Amour, the law professors Lawrence Lessig, Jeanne Fromer, and Robert Spoo, and the copyright lawyer William Patry in believing that, Internet or no Internet, the present level of copyright protection is excessive. By the time most works fall into the public domain, they have lost virtually all their use value. If the public domain is filled with items like hundred-year-old images of the back of Rod Stewart's head, the public good will suffer. The commons will become your great-grandparents' attic.

  As it is, few creations outlive their creators. Of the 187,280 books published between 1927 and 1946, only 2.3 per cent were still in print in 2002. But, since there is no "use it or lose it" provision in copyright law, they are all still under copyright today. Patry, in his recent book, "How to Fix Copyright," notes that ninety-five per cent of Motown recordings are no longer available. Nevertheless, you can't cover or imitate or even sample them without paying a licensing fee -- despite the fact that your work is not competing in the marketplace with the original, since the original is no longer for sale.

• Katha Pollitt: How Pro-Choicers Can Take Back the Moral High Ground: An excerpt from Pollitt's new book, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights.

  A man's home is his castle, but a woman's body has never been wholly her own. Historically, it's belonged to her nation, her community, her father, her family, her husband -- in 1973, when Roe was decided, marital rape was legal in every state. Why shouldn't her body belong to a fertilized egg as well? And if that egg has a right to live and grow in her body, why shouldn't she be held legally responsible for its fate and be forced to have a cesarean if her doctor thinks it's best, or be charged with a crime if she uses illegal drugs and delivers a stillborn or sick baby? Incidents like these have been happening all over the country for some time now. Denying women the right to end a pregnancy is the flip side of punishing women for their conduct during pregnancy -- and even if not punishing, monitoring. In the spring of 2014, a law was proposed in the Kansas Legislature that would require doctors to report every miscarriage, no matter how early in the pregnancy. You would almost think the people who have always opposed women's independence and full participation in society were still at it. They can't push women all the way back, but they can use women's bodies to keep them under surveillance and control.

• Peter Van Buren: Seven Bad Endings to the New War in the Middle East: I know what you're saying: "only seven?" Van Buren doesn't get to the political effects of continuing the War on Terrorism -- of continuing to fund the surveillance state, of the increasing militarization of police departments, of the circumvention of the justice system, of how public funds are being drained as remote and preventable problems are prioritized over real and immediate ones by a political establishment deeply in hock to the security phantom.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Saturday, October 25, 2014

When I was sixteen I probably knew every lyric to every Beatles song extant, so it wasn't hard to recall at least the refrain of the jaunty little title tune on my 64th birthday. "Will you still need me? Will you still feed me?" Back then I wouldn't have had a clue who "you" might be, but I never worried about food: my mother's theme song should have been Cab Calloway's "Everybody Eats When They Come to My House" -- a house I also didn't have a clue how to escape. I celebrated my 16th birthday a couple months late by dropping out of high school. I stayed home a couple days after Christmas when a cousin was visiting. I went back the next day and was so sickened I never returned.

For the next five years I basically hid out in my attic room. I skewed my hours to minimize contact with my parents and siblings, going to sleep minutes before my father got up for work, waking mid-afternoon just in time to watch Dark Shadows and Star Trek reruns. I had a tiny black-and-white TV that ran out of stations shortly after midnight, a tinny stereo with not much more than a dozen LPs, a typewriter, and a growing collection of books and periodicals -- what I spent nearly all of my $10/week allowance on. Evenings I could take the family car out, mostly downtown to bookstores and the library. I was only at ease when surrounded by books, and while my own life was locked down reading made me aware of other worlds and other possibilities.

As I was traveling last week, it occurred to me that there are two types of people in America today: those who can mentally put themselves in other people's predicaments and empathize, and those who can't (or just don't). What triggered this thought was a depression-era story about Uncle Ted: he had heard vigilante threats against a destitute family that had been stealing, so he picked them up and drove them to another county where they had kinfolk; he explained later to his family that he could imagine being so hungry that he might resort to stealing too. Whenever I heard this story, I first think of my harsh experience with thieves, but having known Ted and something of his life and history I wind up recognizing that this story is more complex and nuanced than my own narrow experience knows.

Of course, the point was reinforced many times as I watched political commercials last week. The "two types" don't precisely split along party lines. Indeed, Democrats can appeal to a majority along self-interest lines -- and do so effectively when they point out how Republicans like Tom Cotton (their Senate hopeful in Arkansas) are out to undermine and even dismantle Social Security and Medicare -- but the Republican appeals almost invariably depend on drawing lines between the voters they court and everyone else (all those people outside their identity group, most obsessively president Obama).

Of course, I didn't get to the ability to empathize with others very early. As a child I was exceptionally selfish and greedy, and as an adolescent I withdrew from my social network even before I physically isolated myself. Therefore, much of my early reading focused on my own experiences: education, psychology, religion. One most influential book on the former was Charles Weingartner/Neil Postman's Teaching as a Subversive Activity. Their main argument was that the most valuable thing schooling could do was to encourage students to develop their own finely tuned "bullshit detectors." Needless to say, school as I had known it was strongly focused on rote learning -- including the stock moralism of the day. But there was no shortage of bullshit in the late 1960s, so detection soon became easy. I was soon reexamining every assumption I had been brought up to believe. I had an earlier interest in mainstream politics, so my move to the New Left had conventional framing (except that my ancestral reference system was rooted deeper in Populism and Republican Progressivism than in New Deal/Great Society Liberalism).

As I thought more critically, I came to realize that what gets called madness is often just social nonconformity -- something I had developed a literary and artistic taste for. As for my personal dysfunction, I was much taken with Gregory Bateson's "double-bind theory of schizophrenia": I could see how impossible it was to satisfy all the contradictory moral authorities of my youth. That insight turned my personality problem into a matter of logic, something that reason, and therefore I, could sort out.

Not that it was so simple. I had to force myself to socialize. In 1970 I got a GED and enrolled in Wichita State University. A year later I had 59 units of straight-A credit and a scholarship to transfer to Washington University (St. Louis). Two years later I got my first job, was finally able to support myself, and had had a couple of sexual relationships. A couple years later I moved to New York and soon moved in with my first wife. After she died several years later, I found another relationship, and we've been together for more than twenty-five years now.

And now I'm sixty-four -- a milestone monumental enough to inspire a pop song forty-eight years ago, but today it mostly means that I have one more year to suffer through Obamacare (and, sure, be thankful for that) before Medicare kicks in, eliminating one of the great worries of my de facto retirement. Fifteen years ago I used to joke on my "career assessment forms" that my "career goal" was retirement -- one of many times I've crossed some unstated but expected line of conformity -- but I'm more or less there now. My father retired from his factory job as soon as he could afford to, and thereby got a few good years before a stroke pinned him down. For him, as for most people fortunate enough to be able to afford it, retirement was freedom. I've enjoyed that same freedom since SCO let me go in 2000. But while my work ethic hasn't much flagged, I've become increasingly uncomfortable with my lack of accomplishment (what in engineering we call "deliverables").

My recent travels gave me some time to think about this. I spent, for instance, some time with the same cousin I played hooky to see when I was sixteen. We reminisced, but also she poked some holes in my inequality book outline, making me realize how difficult it's going to be to craft arguments that are almost too obvious to me. I believe that inequality is the core political issue of our time, but not so much to balance everyone's supply of stuff as because it profoundly corrupts our sense of justice, and losing the sense that the political order is ultimately just unravels the whole social fabric. Indeed, it may be that stuff is the wrong way to account for inequality. My working title, Share the Wealth (from Huey Long), could just as well be Share the Freedom -- assuming, as I've concluded, that it takes a certain level of wealth to be free, although it's not clear that more wealth makes one more free (although it has been shown that excess wealth doesn't make one happier).

Better developed is an outline for an essay on Israel, something I talked to several people about. The first two sections would explore the only issues of importance to understanding why Israel's leaders have acted for the better part of a century. The first concerns colonial settler demography: the only places where settlers have retained power are places where the population mix tilted decisely in favor of the settlers (the US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Argentina) while everywhere settlers remained in the minority power has reverted to the majority (most relevantly in South Africa and Algeria). Israel is in between -- secure enough within its 1967 borders but far less so with the Occupied Territories.

The second issue -- perhaps the first chronologically in that it concerns the initial founding of the Zionist movement, but I think it makes more sense to treat it second -- is the dependent dialectic between Zionism and anti-semitism, how it has played out over history, and how it has been twisted around in Israeli self-consciousness. As anti-semitism has waned in the West this link can be questioned, but it is deeply held within Israel, and that has many ramifications that have to be understood. (Israel's obsession with security, for instance, has as much to do with imagined enemies as with real ones.)

The third part would review all significant "peace" proposals since the Peel Commission (or maybe the Balfour Declaration) and pick apart why they have failed -- almost invariably because Israelis have been unable (or unwilling) to reconcile their colonial project with emerging standards of international law on human rights, and lately because Israelis have been able to exploit the archaic rightward turn in US foreign policy. In the past I've written up my pet ideas about how the conflict could be resolved, and some of those ideas may return in an epilogue but my experience is that few people care for my ideas as long as they can hope for something more advantageous.

The other book-like project that came up here and there is the idea of writing a memoir: basically a huge expansion of this post, although I also see it as an occasion to write a personalized history of the era from October 1950 -- a point just before the Chinese entered and turned the tide in the Korean War -- to the present: a long history of imperial decline, with most of the rot on the moral side. (It isn't exactly irony that the US empire expanded as long as we were plausibly anti-imperialist, then declined once we started believing in our destiny. It's just hubris.)

A memoir would also let me look back at where my family came from, how they represented America, and what has happened to more than just me. I could work in some of the stories we batted around on the Arkansas leg of my trip. One of the political ads I saw last week lamented that Arkansas was 48th of 50 states in job creation, but I know good and well that's an old story: seven of my mother's cohort of eight siblings left Arkansas in the 1930s looking for work elsewhere. (Three came to Kansas.) Their stories are interesting, and while I'll never know enough to do them justice, I'd like to know more, and use that as some sort of context. As odd as I grew up, I came from remarkably average roots, and maybe there's some hope in that.

I meant this to come out on my birthday, but events didn't let it work out that way. I was touched by all the good wishes on Facebook, but it was hardly a "great day" -- don't care to go into details, but it slipped out of hand. And the resulting post is rather "stream of consciousness" as I flit from one topic to another.

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Monday, October 6, 2014

Music: Current count 23893 [23870] rated (+23), 526 [521] unrated (+5).

Actually, the week for me ended on Friday, October 3.

New records rated this week:

• Marcia Ball: The Tatooed Lady and the Alligator Man (2014, Alligator): sings blues, plays boogie-woogie, spins a fine yarn then goes for the filler [r]: B+(*)
• François Carrier/Michel Lambert/Alexey Lapin: The Russian Concerts Volume 2 (2013 [2014], FMR): more if you want more, but start with superv Vol. 1 [cd]: B+(***)
• Jack Clement: For Once and for All (2014, IRS Nashville): the late Nashville producer reclaims a few of his songs, with genteel smiling cowboy aplomb [r]: B+(***)
• Neil Cowley Trio: Touch and Flee (2014, Naim Jazz): Brit piano trio for fans of EST and Jarrett continue to keep semipopular jazz respectable [r]: B+(*)
• Mark Elf: Returns 2014 (2013 [2014], Jen Bay Jazz): guitarist who admires Tal Farlow backed by David Hazletine, Peter Washington, Lewis Nash dream band [cd]: B+(**)
• Alice Gerrard: Follow the Music (2014, Tompkins Square): pioneering harmony woman of bluegrass belatedly strikes out on her own, ancient and ragged [r]: B+(***)
• Prince: Art Official Age (2014, Warner Brothers): wondered if he was done, but give him a major label and he'll lay out some major label funk for you [r]: B+(*)
• Prince/3rdEyeGirl: Plectrum Electrum (2014, Warner Brothers): "all-female power trio" means they know Cream's basslines but don't sing like Jack Bruce [r]: B+(*)
• Matthew Shipp: I've Been to Many Places (2014, Thirsty Ear): yet another solo piano record, louder than ever in case you didn't get the point yet [r]: B+(*)
• Tricky: Adrian Thaws (2014, !K7): discovers own name and recovers old tricks for a wide range of poses, must be some kind of midlife crisis [r]: B+(***)
• Ulf Wakenius: Solo: Momento Magico (2013 [2014], ACT): solo guitar, goes for thick chords to add gravitas to an intrinsically light album [r]: B+(*)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:

• Bambara Mystic Soul: The Raw Sound of Burkina Faso 1974-1979 (1974-79 [2011], Analog Africa): obscurities from the heart of the heart of West Africa [r]: B+(**)
• The Evergreen Classic Jazz Band: Early Tunes 1915-1932 (1995 [2014], Delmark): Seattle trad jazz band with banjo and tuba, makes the old songs zing [cd]: A-
• Charlie Haden/Jim Hall: Charlie Haden/Jim Hall (1990 [2014], Impulse): live in Montreal a year late for Haden's big fête, but this is more about the guitarist, drawing him out [r]: A-
• The Rough Guide to Arabic Jazz ([2014], World Music Network, 2CD): rougher than need be, especially with the scene-stealing Cuban ringer the best cut by far [r]: B+(*)
• The Rough Guide to Bollywood Disco (1965-93 [2014], World Music Network, 2CD): dance dance dance with a pre-disco highlight that reminds me of Chubby Checker [r]: B+(***)
• The Rough Guide to the Music of the Sahara [Second Edition] (1980-2013 [2014], World Music Network, 2CD): label annoying as ever, not that they can't program a songlist [r]: B+(***)
• Wild Jimmy Spruill: Scratchin': The Wild Jimmy Spruill Story (1956-63 [2014], GVC, 2CD): various singers sharing Spruill's guitar, a still vital r&b period compiled [cd]: A

Old records rated this week:

• Ruby Braff: Linger Awhile (1953-55 [1999], Vanguard): early sessions led by Buck Clayton and Vic Dickenson, showing the company he keeps and progress [r]: B+(**)
• Matthew Shipp/Guillermo E. Brown: Telephone Popcorn (2005 [2008], Nu Bop): piano-drums duo, half of David Ware's quartet, not quite finished [r]: B+(*)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Alessandro Collina/Rodolfo Cervetto/Marc Peillon/Fabrizio Bosso: Michel on Air (ITI)
• Lajos Dudas Trio: Live at Porgy & Bess (Jazz Sick)
• Lajos Dudas Quartet: Live at Salzburger Jazzherbst (Jazz Sick)
• Eric Hofbauer: Prehistoric Jazz Volume 1: The Rite of Spring (Creative Nation Music)
• Eric Hofbauer: Prehistoric Jazz Volume 2: Quintet for the End of Time (Creative Nation Music)
• Will Holshouser/Matt Munister/Marcus Rojas: Introducing Musette Explosion (Aviary): November 1
• Bill Watrous/Pete Christlieb/Carl Saunders: A Beautiful Friendship (Summit)

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